From what we understand all Google PPC campaigns will be switched to ‘Enhanced campaigns’ as of mid-2013 and it’s basically a way of completely customizing your ads based on the customer to provide more relevant ads to them. It sounds like a lot of the features that are already in place, but now they will be all in one place.
The main changes are aimed at multi-device marketing and contextual ads; you will now be able to change your ads dynamically based on the user’s location, the time of day and the device they are using, rather than having separate groups or campaigns for each. This means you will be able to display smartphone-specific ad copy or tablet specific, or include GEO locations in the advert based on where the user is browsing from, with something as simple as: “What you sell in {GEO}” dynamically adapting to their location.
There are some negative impacts which will render several things in many current campaigns redundant which may mean that some people will have to rework the whole of their PPC.
While the best practice has always been to separate campaigns by device or peak times, such as your mobile or non-office hours campaigns, this functionality will now be made completely redundant, and you will only be allowed one campaign to target multiple devices. Whereas now you may split your budget with different bids depending on the time of day and device, this will also be redundant in the new format, with campaign budgets set at the campaign level and bids at the keyword level, allowing no differentiation between devices.
Basically this will remove the need for multiple campaigns for different times of day and devices, and require one “master” campaign which will hold the entire budget, with bids being set at the keyword level. The budget will not be split dependant on time of day or users device. Advertisers will be able to dynamically change the ads dependant on context, however, which (hopefully) will have a positive impact on the relevance of the ad and hence quality score, cost per click and click-through rate.
The fear, of course, is that it will simply cause PPC bills to go up and CTR to go down. Time will tell as this change is coming and once again, you can’t stand in the way of this improvement.
