Geographic Targeting In An Enhanced Campaign World

AdWords enhanced campaigns will force many advertisers to change their campaign structures. One of the benefits that have been touted for enhanced campaigns is that you will need fewer campaigns, thus making AdWords easier to manage.
For mobile targeting, this is true, as the ability to target mobile devices is now gone. However, for the targeting features that are left, such as location targeting, you might not want to consolidate your campaigns just for easier management.
In today’s column, we will examine how locations affect your campaign structure and if you should change your structure to match the new enhanced campaign benefits.

Location Bid Modifiers

Most accounts do not have the same conversion rates by geography. In some cases, the changes are small; but in other cases, the changes can be quite dramatic.

In this instance, the CPA of San Antonio is double that of Philadelphia. Therefore, we would not want to bid the same for each of these locations. Before enhanced campaigns, in order to bid separately by location, we would need to create a campaign for each location and set bids based upon the keyword CPA by region.
With enhanced campaigns, this will not always be necessary. One of the great new features is bid modifiers based upon locations. With bid modifiers, you can automatically adjust your bid for each location being targeted.
For instance, we can set our keyword bids as normal based upon some global CPA numbers, and then tell AdWords we would like to bid 32% higher for the Philadelphia region and 39% lower for the San Antonio region.

Before you can set a bid modifier for each location, you must add them to your campaign targeting section. If you don’t add each location to your campaign targeting, then you will not be able to set a bid modifier by location.

The good news is that this is very simple. You set bids as normal and then automatically adjust your bid by region.
The main limitation is that this is a campaign-only setting. If you have some keywords that do better in San Antonio than Philadelphia, but overall San Antonio is worse so you’d want to use a negative bid modifier, you cannot exclude keywords from the bid modifiers nor have bid modifiers at the keyword level. Of course, having that level of control would be incredibly difficult to manage by hand, so using campaign bid modifiers is a nice middle step.
The bad news is that these changes just affect the keyword bids for the entire campaign. They do not allow you to adjust the budget or ads for each region. In some cases, you still want to make different campaigns for some locations.
If you are a national company that has never tried to manage bids or budgets by locations, this is a great feature to get you started examining how various locations affect your CPAs so you can start to bid them separately or even target the users differently by location.
Please note, the geographic bid modifier only works with CPC bidding, either manual or enhanced. As with all bid modifiers, it is not compatible with CPA bidding or budget optimizer. The only exception is that you can bid –100% (setting your bid to $0) to not show if the auction uses that bid modifier.

Controlling Budgets

Several years ago, one of the main issues with splitting out your campaigns by region for bidding purposes was that you might have a single budget target, and you didn’t care which region received the click and spent your money, as long as the correct bid was used and you didn’t go over your total budget.
The shared budgets feature fixed this issue for advertisers and created the opportunity to easily use multiple campaigns without fretting over how to split the budget between campaigns.
Some companies have budgets by region. This is common in areas where there are co-op marketing budgets involved, multiple franchise locations, or physical store locations. If you want to maintain budgets by region, then you still want to maintain separate campaigns by region as you cannot split a budget between regions with enhanced campaigns.
If your regions are large, such as the northeast, southwest, and so forth, then you can use bid modifiers within those regions to tweak your CPCs; however, your overall structure of keeping your regions separate for budget reasons is still sound with enhanced campaigns.

Geographic-Specific Ads

One of the main reasons to separate locations into various campaigns is to ensure that the ads speak to that particular geography. The most common instance of this is adding the region to the ad’s headline. However, it is also done to match offline promotions or test responses to offers by region.
If you have split out your campaigns for the purpose of using different ads by region, you will not want to reconsolidate your campaigns as you will lose your ability to specify specific ads by geography. So, if your main reason to use multiple campaigns is for ad serving, you will want to leave your campaigns separated.

Ad Extensions

The last major reason campaigns were split up by region was for extension usage. You might have different sitelinks, offers, or location extensions you wanted to use by campaign. As none of the extensions have a geographic ad serving component (except for the location extension), if you want different offers or sitelinks by region, you still need separate campaigns.
With location extensions, you can decide to bid differently for someone who is within the reach of your location extension. If you first add your location extension as a location target, you can then set a bid adjustment for someone in that radius.

If you have physical locations where you want the customers to come to your business, this is a welcome change as someone who is within a mile of your restaurant is usually worth more than someone who is 30 miles from your location.

Wrap-Up

Enhanced campaign bid modifiers make it easier to manage location-based bids if all your keywords have similar CPAs by region. The ability to set a bid adjustment based upon the user’s proximity to your location is also a welcome change. If you want a simplistic AdWords account, and yet have the ability to set different bids by region, the new enhanced campaign features are a very welcome change.
If you are an advanced advertiser who wants to change budgets, ads, extensions, or individual keyword bids by region, when you upgrade to enhanced campaigns, you will not want to consolidate campaigns just for location targeting purposes. You will still need to consolidate campaigns based upon device types, but you won’t do it for location purposes.
If you have segmented your campaigns by location, you can still take advantage of bid modifiers within the campaigns as locations often have sub-locations (states have metros, metros have cities, etc.) that will commonly have different CPAs by each region which you can micro-manage with bid adjustments. If you are using location extensions, then please take advantage of bid modifiers by location extension reach.
The launch of enhanced campaigns is one of the biggest changes Google has ever implemented, and it will change how AdWords accounts are created, structured and managed. While enhanced campaigns gave additional features to location based bidding, this new campaign type should not force you to reorganize most account structures based solely upon location targeting considerations.

How to use Google Trends as a Keyword Selection Tool

When you are looking for a way to find your keywords for your SEO or for your PPC – you have a lot of free tools you can use for your research.

If you are searching for “used cars” you can get information about how many people are conducting a search for that special word or words. Use free tools like Google Keyword Tool. Or you can use WordTracker.
You will get the information about how many times a phrase is searched for, and  information about words or phrases that are very close to your target keyword. So in our example you will maybe get information about “blue cars” or “new cars”
But with Google Trends you can go much further. First of all it will show you how popular the keyword is over time, showing if your keywords popularity is rising, falling or staying steady.
So let’s say you are not sure if you want to do SEO for the term “blue cars” or “black cars”. Go to the search” and you will see this picture. Don’t write the quote marks, you just write the phrases with a comma between the search phrases. You can compare up to 5 different words or phrases.






 So the “black cars” phrase is very steady and the “blue cars” phrase is rising and falling but is always higher than the phrase black cars.
Google Trends is also a very quick way to get information about singular or plural version of your searched keyword or phrase. Here I will compare “blue car” or “blue cars”.







 Here you can see that there will be much more traffic for the word car than for the word cars.





 To the right you will see the volume of news stories related to your keyword. Below you can see the result from selected cities, selected world regions and by selected world languages.

Google Trend can’t tell you everything
Use Google Tend as a keyword tool. But you will need more research. Google Trend can’t tell you how many times a keyword has been searched. You can compare two or more graphs but not the actual number of searches.
Even though you found the most popular keyword or phrase it doesn’t tell you how competitive the market for that keyword is.
Maybe you will have no change at all to get into top10 for the phrase “Blue Cars” but you will have a great change for the phrase “Black cars” even though the popularity is much lower. And therefor you can get more traffic from that phrase.

Use Google Trend as an inspiration
Start using Google Trend and get inspired. And when you have found a word or two you will need to go to tools like Google Keyword Tool. But Google Trend is a great tool.
And yes.. It’s FREE.

Surviving Google AdWords’ New Enhanced Campaigns

In "Cheaper Clicks from AdWords Coming?,"From a article from Feb. 2012, Someone questioned whether the then unprecedented decline in cost-per-click rates would be a blip or a trend. One year later, Google apparently thinks it's a trend, as Google is requiring all advertisers to adopt its new Enhanced Campaigns.
This will likely reverse the decline in CPC rates that resulted from increased adoption of smartphones and tablets, when advertisers expected lower conversion rates from mobile traffic, and bid down their mobile campaigns. With the new rollout you will still be able to bid down mobile phone clicks, but the way you do that will be much different. If you don’t properly migrate, you’ll be automatically opted into mobile campaigns — paying higher rates — and that could significantly impact the profitability of your campaigns.
To be clear, Google’s transition to Enhanced Campaigns is an important evolution in AdWords, and confers many benefits. It’s important that you prepare for this transition, however, or it could jeopardize the profitability of your campaigns.
Five important changes you should prepare for are as follows.

1. No Segmenting for Tablets

In the past, you’ve been able to segment different campaigns for tablet users and traditional computer users. But now you will no longer be able to. The reason this matters is that many merchants bid their tablet CPCs lower or higher depending on their rate of conversion from tablet users. Since you won’t be able to target unique bids to tablet users, you’ll need to factor this conversion rate impact into your overall bid strategy, which may require you to make significant changes to your bids.

2. No Mobile-only Campaigns

In the past, you’ve been able to create mobile-only campaigns — i.e. smartphones — that target specific keywords, and you’ve been able to adjust bids for individual keywords based on performance. After Enhanced Campaigns rolls out, however, you will have less control. You will have to adjust your smartphone CPC rates, on the campaign rather than the keyword level, by creating “mobile bid adjustments.”
This screenshot shows how the campaign level bid adjustments looks for mobile devices. In this case we’re setting the mobile bid adjustment to 20 percent. In other words, if you are bidding $1 per click on desktops/tablets, your bid for smartphones will be reduced 20 percent to $0.80.

Campaign level bids will need to be adjusted for mobile devices.

3. Campaigns Automatically Opted-in to Mobile

This is perhaps the biggest reason to take control of your migration to Enhanced Campaigns, by following prompts Google will display inside your account, like the one below.

Campaigns will automatically be upgraded to Enhanced.
If Google automatically upgrades you to Enhanced Campaigns, than your campaigns will automatically be opted into Google's mobile network, and you will be paying higher rates for mobile clicks than might be profitable for you. This has the potential to hurt a lot of small businesses who don’t know any better.
The right time to migrate may not be now, however. Once you migrate you cannot revert. If your campaigns are already designated by device, you may want to wait a few months and migrate immediately before the forced upgrade takes place. Companies operating smaller campaigns that just target searches from traditional computers, however, can migrate to Enhanced Campaigns as soon as they’d like.

4. Sitelinks Now Available at the Ad Group Level

In the past, Sitelinks — i.e., additional links below the main body of the pay-per-click ad — could only be setup at the Campaign level. But now they can be setup at the Ad Group level. To understand why this is important, consider the example of an online retailer bidding on the phrase “baseball cleats.” In the screen shot below, you’ll see the advertiser has Sitelinks set up — advertising “Name Brands Up To 80% Off,” “Gift Cards,” “New Arrivals,” and “Baseball Bats.”

Sitelinks can now be set up at the Ad Group level. In this example, Sitelinks are "Name Brands Up To 80% Off Every Day - Gift Cards - New Arrivals - Baseball Bats."
The reason these Sitelinks are so unspecific is that you can only set Sitelinks up at the Campaign level, which means the advertisers had to select generic Sitelinks that applied not only to, say, baseball cleats, but myriad related concepts. Now that Sitelinks can be set at the Ad Group level, the Sitelinks could be more targeted to concepts like “Popular Cleats,” “Clearance Cleats,” or “Nike Cleats.” This will result in a more effective and more profitable ads.
The screen shot below shows the interface for creating a Sitelink, and how they can be automatically adjusted based on the time of day, or day of week. You can also set a mobile preference to target specific Sitelinks to mobile users.

Google's interface for managing Sitelinks.

5. Offer Extensions Now Available at the Ad Group Level

This screenshot details the offer extension interface, which allows you to highlight time-sensitive offers directly within your ads. For example, if your conversion rates on “Baseball cleats,” plummet over the weekend, you can schedule special sales for Saturday and Sunday that will automatically stop on Monday.

The offer extension interface.

Conclusion

I talk with many online retailers who spend thousands of dollars per month on AdWords, and less than two hours per month on the management of those campaigns. Enhanced Campaigns is likely only one of many major changes Google will make to AdWords this year. Retailers who do not continually optimize their campaigns — in light of the changes — will incur higher costs. In the case of Enhanced Campaigns, in particular, there is a big cost to ignoring the upgrade.

Tablet Growth Encouraging for Mobile Marketers

Looking at 2013, mobile ad network Jumptap expects tablets to make up nearly a third of mobile devices, and iOS and Android operating systems to completely overpower RIM.
In its February MobileSTAT report, Jumptap reported that in 2012, feature phones still made up 4% of the market share, while smartphones made up 78% share and tablets saw 18%. But looking to 2013, Jumptap forecasts that tablet market share will increase to 29%, with smartphones’s share dropping to 70%, and feature phones coming in at only 2% of devices.


“We think smartphones and tablets can both grow in parallel at the same time, because they perform different functions,” said Matt Duffy, VP of marketing at Jumptap, highlighting how consumers turn to tablets more at night and in lieu of their PCs. Marketers must include tablet advertising and outreach as part of their strategies, he emphasized, even as most tablet owners are more tech-savvy and already own smartphones.
“There is a lot of value with hitting a consumer with a message on their smartphone, but also sending the same message or a follow-up message on their tablet,” Duffy told AdExchanger. “There is a lot of value in at least knowing how much you’re reaching the same consumer on multiple devices.”
In the rest of the report, Jumptap also predicted that iOS and Android will account for 96% of operating system market share in 2013, leaving RIM at 2%.

Samsung continues to be the leader when it comes to Android devices, with its market share rising to 56% from 42% in 2011, and continuing to grow in 2013. Jumptap notes that advertisers hoping to make the most of mobile outreach should not only focus on both iOS and Android operating systems, but also expect that most Android users will be accessing their content via Samsung devices.

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.