Google Quietly Rolls Out New Offer Extension in Adwords

Google is now rolling out Offer Extensions, their latest ad extension that lets AdWords advertisers post deal offers underneath a normal Google Search ad. If your AdWords account has been upgraded to Enhanced Campaigns, then you’ll see the new Offer Extension in your account right now, in the “extensions” tab. If not, you’ll have to wait until your account gets upgraded, which is supposed to happen by the end of the month. Previously, they were only available to a select few number of beta customers.

Here’s what an Offer Extension looks like:

 

Users who click on the View Offer link are taken to a Google-hosted landing page. From there, the discount can be printed out, or saved for later in a user’s Google Offers account, for use in-store.

How Does Offer Extensions Compare to Past Google Deal Endeavors?

You might recall that Google has had past attempts at entering into the coveted deal space that sites like Groupon and Living Social dominate.

Google’s first attempt was the simplest – buy out someone else! Back in 2010, Google was negotiating a buy for Groupon, but their 6 billion dollar offer was rejected, and later Groupon filed for IPO.

This didn’t discourage Google – instead, the search giant started its own deal offering called “Google Offers.” Google Offers was basically a complete copycat of Groupon, but it was never able to overthrow the existing King of Deals, and has been a bit of a flop as far as Google product endeavors are concerned.

Google’s next big move was the “Save to Wallet” feature that worked within Google Wallet. The “Save to Wallet” function let Google Wallet users clip and save coupons they saw online, which could then be used later for online or in-store purchases. When Google Wallet users entered a store or restaurant where the deal could be used, they would get a notification reminding them about the stored coupon. The “Save to Wallet” feature was a smart idea, but it didn’t get much traction since there isn’t a huge contingency of people using Google Wallet (at least, not yet).

The new Offer Extensions feature is different than Google’s past deal experiments because rather than introduce a new product, Google is simply adding a feature to the already widely used AdWords advertising platform.

Why Do Offer Extensions Matter?

While you may feel conditioned to ignore Offer Extensions as just another useless add-on, Offer Extensions has some serious power up its sleeve. Why?

1. It Could Kill Groupon

Offer Extensions could be the nail in the coffin for Groupon, who has been struggling to stay afloat as their stock has plummeted. Offer Extensions are cheap (a click on an offer costs the same as a normal ad click), easy to set up, and allow advertisers to maintain control over their offers. Meanwhile, deal sites like Groupon and Living Social take as much as half of the deal profits (off of already deeply discounted merchandise), require jumping through hoops with representatives, and don’t allow for much modification once a deal is posted, and overall are a terrible deal for advertisers. It seems like an obvious choice for advertisers.

2. Ads With Offer Extensions Get More Clickable Ad Space

Ads that feature Offer Extensions get more valuable SERP real estate, and feature bright buttons that are just begging to be clicked. In a world where even a slight change in wording and an added exclamation mark can drastically improve click-through-rates, having coupon offers attached to ads could mean skyrocketing CTRs and increased Quality Scores.

3. Conversion Tracking For Offline Actions

Marketers regularly struggle with measuring the offline results of their online efforts. An in-store purchase could be a result of someone seeing your online ad and remembering your business, but as an advertiser, you’d never be able to make the connection. Offer Extensions alleviates some of the problem by tracking how many users print and redeem your deal, bridging the gap between online ads and in-store results.

Will Search Marketers Accept Google’s Offer Extensions?

Threatening to destroy the Groupon deal empire and opening up the deal market to the masses, Google’s Offer Extensions is not a feature to be ignored. What will innovative marketers do with this exciting new advertising extension? There is certainly room for creativity and experimentation here, so keep an eye out for these coupon/advertisement hybrids on a search engine results page near you!

Should You Upgrade To AdWords Enhanced Campaigns?

Google made a huge splash last week when they announced Enhanced Campaigns. There have been both positive and negative reactions to the announcement.
If you haven’t heard about the changes, here is the quick, bullet-point list:

• The ability to set mobile-specific bids will be removed (you can do bid adjustments at the campaign level)
• The ability to target specific mobile devices and carriers will be removed
• The ability to specifically target tablets will be removed and bundled with desktop campaigns
• You can now control ad extensions by ad group
• You can now use ad scheduling for sitelinks
• You can do bid changes by geography (like mobile, this is a simple plus or minus percentage)

Some of these changes are excellent, such as ad group level ad extensions. Others will upset some marketers because they are going to lose lots of mobile targeting options.
Instead of getting on a soapbox and talking about how good or bad the changes are, I’m going to focus on whether or not you should upgrade immediately or hold off upgrading. Eventually, you will have to upgrade to Enhanced Campaigns, but you have several months before being forced to upgrade. Today, we’ll examine what accounts should be upgrading right away versus waiting to make the changes.

Who Should Wait A Long Time To Upgrade

1.  Sophisticated Mobile Accounts
If you are running sophisticated mobile campaigns, you will want to wait to upgrade. I have some accounts where I bid differently by device; device and carrier; and even some that are segmented by device, carrier and geography.

This type of granular control will be completely removed. For these types of accounts, you will want to wait and see if Google makes any changes to the targeting before you must switch to Enhanced Campaigns, and if not, you will want to really think through your upgrade strategy of combining campaigns together.
2.  Mobile Only Accounts
It is not uncommon to see small accounts only target mobile devices. These accounts often have small to medium spends, and they are focused on phone calls. When you examine their spends, they can be profitable by only spending their money on mobile campaigns, and they don’t even run ads on desktops.
In the new world of Enhanced Campaigns, you cannot only target mobile devices. You will set your bids at the keyword or ad group level as normal, and then you can choose to override that bid for mobile devices by decreasing your bid up to 100% (which means you will not be shown on mobile as your bids will be zer0); or, you can raise your bids up to 300%.
That means if you were bidding $15 per click on a mobile device, you must now bid at least $5 for desktop clicks and set your bid boost to 300%. You are going to spend some money on desktops; and therefore, your overall profits will probably decline in this particular instance. These accounts should wait to upgrade.
3.  Tablet Optimized Websites
You cannot target tablets differently from desktops at all. This means that you cannot set different destination URLs for tablets. So, if you have made a tablet optimized website, you will need to make sure that your site detects the tablet and redirects the user to the tablet site.
4.  Vastly Different Desktop & Tablet CPAs
I work on some accounts where tablet clicks are much more valuable than desktop clicks. I work on some where they are about the same. I work on others where tablets have been disabled as they are so much worse than desktop clicks.
With Enhanced Campaigns, you cannot treat tablets and desktops separately, including bid adjustments. Therefore, for accounts with vastly different desktop and tablet CPAs, you will need to start working toward blended bids before you upgrade.

Bid adjustments are only by mobile devices; not for tablets.

Phone Specific Apps

I do want to clarify one point of confusion. I’ve heard from app makers that they are going to have problems promoting their products; and to some degree, this might be an issue. However, you can make app ads that are only shown on an iOS or Andriod device (sorry, no windows targeting yet). So, for your app install, you can target just the device type.
However, if you also run ads for your app that go to your website to showcase how to use the app, those ads will show on any device type. So, if you are only using app ads, upgrading is not going to affect you. If you are using app and regular text ads, then you might wait to upgrade.
These are the types of accounts that should wait to upgrade. There are other account types that will benefit from account upgrades right away.

Who Should Upgrade Now?

1.  Accounts Doing Very Little Mobile Targeting
The downsides to the new Enhanced Campaigns are mostly around mobile. The upsides are bid adjustments and great control over extensions. Therefore, if you are doing very little or no mobile, there isn’t any downside to upgrading to enhanced accounts.
2.  Accounts Struggling With Geographic Bidding
Almost every account has different CPAs and conversion rates by geography. You can see this data in the dimensions tab:

In this account, the CPAs range from $45 to $91 in their top 9 converting cities by absolute conversions. Therefore, this account first did some segmentation by geography into high, medium, and low performing areas in order to set different bids by region. The keywords and ads are identical for each region – only the bids change.
When you make some broad statements that have many exceptions about geographic targeting, most accounts fall into one of a few types:

• Targeting a small area
• A different campaign for every geography to control bids (but not ad changes)
• A different campaign for every geography to control ads (and maybe bids)
• The campaigns are national, or large regions, and even though performance changes by region, you don’t bid separately by region

With the new structure, you can set bid changes by geography for the same keywords by only using one campaign and bid boosts.

Accounts that have struggled with taking advantage of geographic data will benefit from these changes and will see benefits in upgrading their campaigns.
3.  Accounts Segmented By Extension Usage
Ad extensions were campaign level only. Therefore, some accounts are segmented based upon extension usage. If you wanted different site links to appear for certain keywords and not others, then you needed to put these keywords in their own campaigns.
If you wanted one ad to use a location extension, but you didn’t want that same extension in another ad group in the same campaign, then you needed two campaigns. This caused some accounts to grow out of control just because of the extension usage.
The new structure allows you to control most extensions at the campaign or ad group level. Some extensions, such as social, are still only at the campaign level. You can designate some extensions as mobile-preferred and even set up ad scheduling for some extensions, such as sitelinks.

Conclusion

These are some of the more common reasons I’m seeing to upgrade or  hold off upgrading.
There are more reasons to upgrade or to postpone your upgrade. For instance, if you have several thousand campaigns, even if you aren’t doing any mobile advertising, you want to really dig into your tablet and desktop data, conversion rates by geography, keyword overlap, and more before you decide to upgrade and possibly combine campaigns. In that case, it’s not an issue of not wanting to upgrade, it is a matter of thinking through your upgrade plan.

In other cases, when you look at a desktop-only e-commerce site that can now change bids by geography and control extensions by ad group, there is no reason, except for planning, to hold off on the upgrade.
Once you are ready to upgrade, what I would suggest is not immediately upgrading your campaigns at that moment in time. Instead, make a new campaign (it can be paused; it doesn’t have to be live) so you can play with how the bidding changes will work and how the extensions will be controlled. Get some firsthand experience. Once you see how you can control the extensions and the possibilities for bid changes, then think through how you can take advantage of the changes.

Once you are ready to take advantage of the changes, or mitigate the risks in the case of sophisticated mobile advertisers, then feel free to upgrade to the new enhanced campaigns.

AdWords Enhanced Campaigns Hands-On

Google has already started to roll out the newly announced AdWords enhanced campaigns to select accounts . Advertisers can expect to see a banner offering the chance to upgrade.
All campaigns will be automatically upgraded by "mid-2013", but we’ve gained access in a few places already and wanted to explore what’s new in a hands-on review. For advertisers planning their strategy for using enhanced campaigns, here’s the good, the bad, and the clunky in this new system.

1. R.I.P. Mobile Specific Campaigns

Account management is being streamlined by having desktop and mobile exist together. It's still possible to turn mobile campaigns off with a bid modifier of -100%, but it's never possible to turn desktop off.

 t also appears in the accounts that we've upgraded so far that Google is pitching mobile CPCs cheaper than desktop. This could present opportunities for higher click volumes for advertisers who haven't paid close attention to mobile previously; though with a default setting of 10 percent lower than desktop, Google is still targeting a level higher than many more savvy advertisers will be achieving currently.

The other tweak this change will necessitate is the separation of display and search campaigns. This has always been best practice for any knowledgeable advertiser, but with enhanced campaigns anyone leaving things combined will now lose device targeting capability in display campaigns.

2. Extensions Set at the Ad Group Level

 It's now possible to set extensions at an ad group level. At the moment this applies to sitelinks, call extensions, app extensions, and offers (U.S. only).

 

For sitelinks this comes with a bigger change in functionality. The individual links now exist as separate entities, rather than as one block defined at the campaign level. You can now mix and match links, have some individual ones defined as mobile only and get comprehensive performance data, which had been sorely lacking previously.

3. Free Phone Calls

Call metrics, Google's phone call tracking system, has had a price reduction. Calls generated from tablet and desktop were previously charged at a minimum cost of £1 in the UK. This cost has now disappeared, meaning calls from any device are now free.
Google has also included a bit more detail. Call conversions data still isn’t available at a keyword level, but there is data against ad ids, which is a plus.

4. Location Targeting

Location targeting is no longer just on or off. One campaign can hold many locations with different bid modifiers.
What isn't clear is what happens if you have overlapping radius targets – if you want to bid 50 percent higher within a 1 mile radius, 25 percent higher within a 5 mile radius and run default bids within a 15 mile radius, it’s not clear whether the overlapping radii targets will conflict.

5. Scheduling

The visually appealing interface for ad scheduling has gone but in its place is a list-based control. This is less useful in the AdWords interface currently.
If you have a lot of dayparts it's an arduous task setting bid modifiers, even if you want the same pattern every day. You can still copy scheduling between campaigns, although not between enhanced and standard.

What's Missing?

Bid modifiers are currently a blunt tool and are simply aggregated when multiple modifier types overlap.
You can't boost mobile bids at lunch time and then desktop bids in the afternoon, despite that being an ideal response to expected user behavior. Google produced a lot of data suggesting this was the right thing to do when they first started pushing mobile heavily, so it’s surprising that this option isn’t available immediately.
This may be additional functionality that will appear over the course of the rollout or beyond, but it’s also possible that this is a case of breaking things short-term to fix them long-term. Hopefully down the line Google will move further toward user-centric cross-device attribution, meaning this kind of fine control may be reserved for this next step, if and when it comes.

Enhanced campaigns are brand new to most AdWords users and will doubtless generate a wealth of new possibilities, and problems.