Nowadays, people are constantly switching between devices, using whatever works best for where they are and whatever they’re trying to do. Devices are also evolving quickly, with a growing list of capabilities, which is where Google’s Enhanced Campaigns might come in handy.
Enhanced Campaigns provides new ways to help you reach the right audience at the moments that matter, by targeting people with the right Google paid ads (PPC) across all devices – based on their specific location, the time of day and their device type.
After weeks of planning and a bombardment of notifications reminding everyone that they should upgrade to Enhanced Campaigns by 22nd July or that Google would do it for you, it seems the deadline has passed. However, a blog posted on the cut-off date by senior vice president of ads and commerce Sridhar Ramaswamy noted that a grand switch to Enhanced Campaigns would not happen, but would instead rollout gradually over several weeks.
This was the first sign from Google that the switch to Enhanced Campaigns wasn’t going to be a completed in one day. Google’s main focus was to get as many campaigns upgraded as possible ahead of its proposed 22nd July deadline, but in hindsight this now appears to be the likely reason for communicating the set date as a cut off.
The approach seems to have served its purpose however, with Google reporting that advertisers have upgraded over six million legacy campaigns. This represents almost 75 per cent of active campaigns with the remaining now being upgraded automatically.
MEC opinion
Enhanced Campaigns are one of the biggest changes to the industry for years and you would have been unwise to ignore the numerous notifications. The fact that Google has now stated that roll out will happen over weeks does not affect any of our clients. Having a target switch-over day enabled us to prioritise and plan the switch over of our clients’ accounts.
Since our clients campaigns have been switched over we have seen some very impressive early results with the roll out of enhanced site links seeing as much as a 36 per cent increase in Click Through Rate.
In addition, Enhanced Campaigns has made geo-targeting and time of day bidding far easier, rather than having to run multiple campaigns all targeting the same terms in different areas and allowing for up weighting/down weighting bids depending on the hour of the day, we can now optimise just the one campaign and still utilise all the benefits of geo-targeting and time of day bid strategies.