On February 6th, Google announced the forthcoming “Enhanced campaigns.“ This post takes a look at what an enhanced campaign is, why an enhanced campaign is bad for some clients, and uses data to prove this point.
What is an enhanced Campaign? According to Google “enhanced campaigns” are a necessary change to their adwords system, based on the fact that “People are constantly connected and moving from one device to another to communicate, shop and stay entertained.” Duly noted.
What does this enhancement do? The immediate change is this: With “Enhanced campaigns” you can no longer target cell phone users totally differently than you would desktop users. Today, Rolling Stone magazine can send an advertiser to www.RollingStone.com , or to http://m.rollingstone.com – the later being a mobile version of the site. This ability will vanish once their campaign is “Enhanced” – Adwords will make RollingStone choose one or the other. It will allow advertisers to target phone users differently – say, bid 25% more when someone’s on a phone – but it won’t let you serve different URL’s at different times. So on the plus side, I think this change will make it easier for small businesses to target people slightly differently. But for mid-sized clients – let’s say, businesses between 5 and 50 million in revenue? – this is a negative.
One client, an East Coast brand with multiple locations in the NYC Tri-State area, sells an in-home service – the come to you. For every $100 they spend on desktop advertising, they get 3 leads. For every $100 they spend on smartphone advertising, they get 12 leads. Obviously, we want to spend more budget on mobile traffic, and less on desktop traffic. In fact, I might want to totally shut off all desktop traffic for certain days and only run mobile traffic for others, and I will lose that ability with these new enhanced campaigns. Enhanced campaigns are good for the local pizzeria, but bad for more sophisticated advertisers.