Google Enhanced Campaigns are coming and they will attack your account in July.
You need to be prepared and I’m going to help you!
The very short history of Enhanced Campaigns.
Back around February of this year, Google announced that they were introducing Enhanced Campaigns. Simply put, Enhanced Campaigns remove some of your control over how you target your customers.
- You can no longer target specific mobile devices on their own.
- You can no longer exclude traffic from tablet devices such as iPads, Kindle Fires and the like.
On July 22 of this year, Google will convert your campaigns, choosing the options that best suits their needs. That’s right, if you do nothing, the people who gain from every click made in your campaigns will be converting them over to Enhanced Campaigns.
In other words if you weren’t paying for mobile traffic before, you will be come July. Worse than that, if you have mobile specific campaigns that direct traffic to a special mobile designed website, they will begin to receive desktop traffic as well. Somehow, I suspect that won’t perform very well.
I absolutely don’t want that to happen, what can I do?
Log into your AdWords account and you should see within your list of campaigns a column called “Enhanced”. If you see that each of your campaigns or some of them are set as “Legacy”, that means that they need to be converted over to Enhanced Campaigns or Google will do it for you in July.
The conversion process is pretty straightforward. You can either convert all campaigns through the new Campaign Upgrade center, using the AdWords Editor or you can do them one at a time by clicking on the “Get started” button:
Once you begin the conversion process, you will be asked how much you want to spend on your mobile traffic. This is where it will be tricky for some advertisers. If you weren’t targeting mobile traffic in the past and you still don’t want to target them going forward, set your mobile bid adjustment for -100%. To do so, you simply select “Decrease by” from the dropdown and enter 100 in the text box. Google will make all sorts of recommendations but I have never seen them recommend not to target mobile which is why it’s so important that you control this process.
The next step, you’ll need to upgrade your sitelinks.
If you’re staggering your conversion to Enhanced Campaigns, I would recommend that you click on the “Upgrade campaign’s sitelink extensions” instead of “Upgrade all sitelink extensions”.
Don’t get me wrong, there are some positives with Enhanced Campaign such as the new sitelink extensions that allow you to configure at the ad group level instead of the campaign. That being said, the negatives (loss of some control) outweighs the positives.
The choice is yours. You can either be proactive and convert early or have Google do it for you. Enhanced Campaigns are coming whether you like it or not.
