Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Ryan Engley: I want to start advertising on mobile, so how should I set up my account?
Anna Sawyer: So, this is a question that two weeks ago, I would have answered differently.
And I do want to take a little time and talk about Google's new release which is called
Enhanced Campaigns. Just about two weeks ago, Google made a really big announcement. They
are making a huge change to the way campaigns are structured.
And when everyone was signing up for the webinar, we got a ton of questions about Enhanced Campaigns.
So I'll give you a general overview of the way Enhanced Campaigns are going to work,
then I would love to answer some more questions if you want to put them in the chat.
If you'll go down to the next slide, I pulled something out of a deck that Google shared
with us. So in the past, the general best practice was to separate mobile campaigns
from desktop campaigns, because those types of users work differently. They look for different
things. If you're looking for pizza on your cell phone, you're probably looking to order
a pizza with a phone number and if you're looking to order a pizza on your computer,
your behaviour is going to be different.
But with this new release, Enhanced Campaigns, you actually can't have a mobile only campaign
anymore. Any keyword you want to bid on has to run on desktop computers and mobile devices.
So like I said before, we would set up separate mobile campaigns within our AdWords accounts
and run these strategies that were specific for mobile. This has been the best practice
that has been preached for a very long time, but this is no longer true. All accounts that
have separate device campaigns will be force merged this year. And it's looking like this
might happen in June, so it's a very bold move. Google says that they made this change
to allow us to target searchers based on both context and keywords and I will say that depending
where you are in the paid search landscape, feelings about this are very mixed. More advanced
advertisers who have spent all this time building out these big mobile campaigns are angry because
they feel like they've lost some control. But the truth is, this is going to happen
so we need to be prepared for it.
So there are a couple of new words that we need to learn. We've always thought of mobile
as meaning a mobile device like an iPhone, but Google is using the words "mobile" and
"static". "Mobile" is defined by Google as someone who is out and about, rather that
someone who is on a specific device. Static is someone who is at home or work, which Google
says influences the way they behave and it's very hard to argue with that.
Now, Google says the device doesn't necessarily suggest the behaviour and an example that
I was thinking of was -- there's some sort of statistic recently which I'm going to flub,
but -- some massive number of people were using their iPhones from the safety of their
couch during the Superbowl. So, if you were targeting mobile users, they would be seeing
ads that may not have been designed for their specific behaviour. Google also says that
from a user behaviour perspective, tablet and laptop segments are losing their distinction,
so you will no longer be able to target separately to tablets and laptops.
So, there are a lot of different things that you can do. You can mark individual ads as
"mobile preferred", which means that if they're out and about, they'll see that ad, whether
they're on a tablet or maybe on a laptop on a train or in a coffee shop. And it naturally
goes along with this that if you're thinking about contextual strategy vs. device strategy,
you can create landing pages that make more sense for the action of the user, rather than
the device.
I feel like I'm going for a long time on this, but we've had a ton of questions about this
and I'll just give you a few more thoughts about the way enhanced campaigns are going
to work. The thing people are most concerned about is bidding. You will actually be able
to create something called a mobile bid multiplier, which is based on the value of these users
to you. It can be location based, so you can bid more for users that are near your location,
but there is no keyword level control, so this means you are going to lose the advantage
of being able to bid lower on short tail keywords that people were using on mobile. This is
the thing that's got people way up in arms, because people are saying Google is doing
this, because they're trying to make mobile a bigger product for them, so they're forcing
everyone into doing mobile. It's pretty interesting, there's a huge kerfuffle all over the internet
about this.
But the truth is this is coming, so I'll talk a little bit about what you can do to prepare.
Just for the purposes of what I'm going to talk about, I'll assume you already have mobile
specific campaigns set up now. If you don't, you have a bit of an advantage, because you
will need to learn how to use those, but it'll just be like learning any other skill. And
there is actually a huge training center. I think it's something like http://www.google.com/adwords/enhancedcampaigns/.
So you have about six months to change and they are suggesting -- they're letting people
switch over in the next few weeks and they're actually using some beta users. We suggest
you really prepare for this. So the number 1 thing you need to prepare to do is figure
out what keywords you're going to keep and figure out what your bid multiplier settings
are. So this will boil down to figuring out your average conversion rates for mobile and
for desktop and maybe creating extra campaigns for conversion rates that are either on the
high end or low end.
The thing is people are unhappy or people are happy and we really believe that this
will simplify mobile strategy going forward and there are some really cool reporting things
that are coming out of this. Like, Google is promising that there will be the ability
to see attribution across devices and contexts. And like I said, there is a lot of grumbling
that Google is doing this to drive up their revenue from mobile clicks and yes, that will
happen, but it's something we need to prepare for and it's exciting in a lot of ways.