By Alan Coleman on 1 Aug 2014
It’s just over a year now since the sun set on Legacy AdWords campaigns and we all began to bask in the light of Google’s Enhanced campaigns. There were plenty of predictions thrown about with regards to how they would change our targeting options and the performance of our AdWords accounts. But now, a year on, which of the most common predictions have come to fruition and which of them have been shown to be wide of the mark?
‘Enhanced Campaigns will take away our ability to effectively target different devices.’
Legacy Campaigns allowed us to target campaigns specifically at desktops, tablets, mobiles, or any combination of the three. As we know, users behave differently on different devices and we were able to target users based on their device. We used to see particularly good results from tablets, so we were distraught to hear that we could no longer specifically target tablet users and that they were getting thrown in with desktop users.
Although Enhanced Campaigns offer the option of a bid multiplier for mobile devices, this is still one prediction that was definitely fulfilled. Our targeting options for devices are much more limited than they were with Legacy Campaigns. A bid multiplier just isn’t the same as a mobile-specific campaign, and no matter how many times they tell me, I still believe that desktop and tablet users just don’t behave the same way.
I’m giving this prediction a big old ‘Yes’.
‘CPCs are going to rise and rise.’
Some of the more cynical among us (myself included) believed there had to be a reason for Google making changes that ostensibly weakened the targeting methods available to advertisers.
Legacy campaigns allowed us to manage separate campaigns for each type of device. Average CPCs were generally lower on tablets and mobile devices due to less competition. This meant that we could lower our bids for these devices, and manage them more effectively, while still showing our ads in similar (or higher) positions to where they appeared on desktops.
We could also create adtexts which were really specific to each device. This helped to improve quality score and, in turn, reduce CPCs.
The theory was that by removing the ability for advertisers to segment their campaigns by device, it would force CPCs up. The ability to manage your bids on tablets was removed completely, and was made more difficult for mobile devices, meaning that a lot of advertisers would end up bidding more for these clicks than they would have before.
CPCs did rise immediately following the introduction of Enhanced Campaigns. However, they have dropped since then and are now lower than they were this time last year. Having said that, they have been on the increase again over the past few months but there’s no escaping the fact that Google’s average CPCs are down 6% year-on-year.
There has been lots of other stuff going in the last year that may have impacted this in addition to Enhanced campaigns, but it is very difficult to isolate which factors have had the greatest influence and this is the best data we have.
So I’m giving this prediction a tentative ‘No’, but I may come back to this at some point if we see the current trend continuing.
‘The time you spend optimising your accounts will be greatly reduced.’
With great power comes great responsibility. We loved being able to target specific types of devices with their own campaigns, but more often than not, it meant have 3 versions of every campaign in the account. This meant that we had 3 times as many campaigns to optimise on a day-to-day basis.
As we know, Enhanced Campaigns grouped these devices into one campaign. While I’m not a fan of the reduction of my targeting options, it is immeasurably more time-efficient now to carry out keyword optimisations and the like.
This means that we can now spend more of the time we used to spend on these tasks tweaking other aspects of the account and utilising the great new features which Google have introduced into the Enhanced Campaigns. The time saved going through search term reports can go in to making the account as well-rounded and as finely tuned as possible.
This prediction is getting an emphatic ‘Yes’.
So after all of that, are advertisers better off than we were this time last year? There’s no doubt that there has been some fantastic aspects to Enhanced Campaigns, as well as some exciting new features, but I do still occasionally find myself pining for certain aspects of the Legacy campaigns from time to time.
There’s a give-and-take with any big change like this one, but if I absolutely had to get off the fence on which I currently find myself perched, I would lean slightly towards Enhanced campaigns.
Am I right, or am I just a sucker for anything shiny and new? Let me know what you think.
