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.
You’ll
notice in the Google-provided screenshot example above, there are
columns for Revenue and Ecommerce Conversion Rate in the Summary view.
These metrics are available when Ecommerce tracking is enabled in Google
Analtyics, allowing you to analyze bid adjustment performance by ROI.
However, when you look at your own reporting, you may see that the
Summary view only shows goal results and that the columns for Revenue
and Ecommerce Conversion Rate appear under the Ecommerce view instead.
You’ll
notice in the Google-provided screenshot example above, there are
columns for Revenue and Ecommerce Conversion Rate in the Summary view.
These metrics are available when Ecommerce tracking is enabled in Google
Analtyics, allowing you to analyze bid adjustment performance by ROI.
However, when you look at your own reporting, you may see that the
Summary view only shows goal results and that the columns for Revenue
and Ecommerce Conversion Rate appear under the Ecommerce view instead.
