By Lori Sullivan
If you are a Google Adwords user, you’ve probably noticed the Enhance Campaigns upgrade invitation luring you into new PPC territory. Haven’t yet switched over? Prepare to make the plunge on July 22 when Google makes the transition automatically. But don’t worry! Although similar targeting was actually available in AdWords even before Enhanced Campaigns was born, Google now brings new opportunities to the surface and makes this targeting approach easy to use.
The largest advantage of Enhanced Campaigns is the ability to target your audience more thoroughly by optimizing your campaigns for desktop and mobile. With online users constantly switching between multiple devices, we now more than ever need to be strategic when it comes to offering potential customers exactly what they want, when they need it and where it will be most applicable. On mobile specifically, Enhanced Campaigns let us use user context to draw people in and entice them to take action.
User context allows you to manage your AdWords bids across time, location and device all in one campaign. With campaign setting options like simple ad scheduling and location, and device-based bid adjusting, ads instantly become context-aware and are ultimately better positioned to reap a better ROI.
For example, let’s talk food! Imagine you are a restaurant owner who is planning your PPC advertising strategy, and you choose to utilize user context targeting. If your restaurant takes orders by phone, you could use device-based bidding options to bid more on traffic originating from mobile devices. You could also bid more on weekday traffic during business hours or possibly just focus heavily on the 5 p.m. rush hour. In the same capacity, if your restaurant is closed on Sundays, you could bid 50% less on clicks during that day. When all aspects of your user context bidding strategy come together, ads hit your restaurant’s potential customers when they are most likely to consider taking action.
Although it is a simplistic use of Enhanced Campaigns, this example demonstrates the power of user context targeting. Especially on mobile devices where 3 out of 4 searches trigger follow-up action, it is crucial that we consistently create more engaging, optimized ads and bid smarter for clicks.
