How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Enhanced Campaigns

When Google announced their move to enhanced campaigns in February, many thought that Google had gone too far. Pundits said that it was a sign that their empire was sure to crumble. Who was Google to treat advertisers and agencies this shabbily?

I wasn't immune to the feelings of helplessness and contempt as we faced a huge migration and a perceived loss of control of our clients' search budgets.

Fast-forward just four months and I have a confession to make: I love enhanced campaigns! Once I got past the fact that Google had just forced a massive organizational change on us and everyone else, it started to become clear that these changes can benefit a lot more than just Google investors pockets.

So if you haven't migrated already, or you have migrated but aren't doing anything differently, here are some good reasons to adopt enhanced campaign functionality as soon as possible.

Get Your PLAs on Mobile

Enhanced campaigns give retail advertisers the opportunity to get their product listing ads in front of a mobile audience. This isn't available to PLA campaigns that haven't yet been "enhanced."

While the PLA experience today on mobile is generally comprised of ecommerce advertisers, longer term this will be inventory that will be setting the stage for local promotions and availability front and center on the mobile device.

Simpler Campaign Set Up

Finally online-only advertisers don't have to create hundreds of geo-targeted campaigns to ensure bid efficiency by market.

Armed with years of data on the efficiency of markets relative to one another, these ratios can now be easily implemented and stored within AdWords to be leveraged across all campaigns.

Reduce Budget Partitioning Headaches

Who ever really knew how to budget for mobile relative to desktop anyways? It was always an artificial distinction driven by historical data that was changing wildly from month to month.

That doesn't matter anymore. Just set a budget for your search campaign and bid optimize to account for the relative value of the two traffic sources.

Use Consistent Metrics Across Device

As a corollary to the above, enhanced campaigns force better alignment between how mobile, desktop, and tablet campaigns are managed.

While Google would like you to believe that mobile bid adjustments should be close to zero, this figure should vary from business to business depending on that advertisers ability to turn mobile campaigns into dollars.

Enhanced campaigns force that comparison as opposed to having advertisers arbitrarily say that mobile deserves significant budgets because it's "the future."

You Should Pay More For Tablet Traffic

We all can acknowledge that it was pretty much unfair that we were paying a lower CPC for a higher qualified, more affluent customer on a tablet.

This move by Google to combine that traffic with desktop traffic should be a wake up call to get your mobile experience in gear and generate the revenue from it that you deserve.

Make Magic With Sitelinks

Perhaps the greatest benefit of enhanced campaigns is the flexibility it offers around using sitelinks. The ability to vary sitelinks at the ad group level and schedule their rotation enables much richer ad experiences.

For instance, you are now able to offer single product offers via sitelinks as opposed to generic sitewide offers. You can also enable phone numbers only when call center reps are available to your customers.

Summary

You can argue with the way enhanced campaigns were forced upon us. However, the results are undeniable. It's time to embrace enhanced campaigns for what they can do for you, and stop whining about what they did to you.