Get a Head Start with Enhanced Campaigns: Why to Upgrade Now

Enhanced campaigns offer an array of new features to drive better performance and efficiency. With more than three million campaigns already upgraded, we’ve heard many great examples of advertisers finding new pockets of revenue and reaching new customers with enhanced campaigns – all while saving time. As the the auto-upgrade approaches on July 22, we’re introducing some new features in the Upgrade Center today to make the process of upgrading even easier. Upgrade today to start realizing the benefits right away.

5 reasons to upgrade now
By upgrading now and becoming a pro with the new features before the auto-upgrade, you can get a head start on driving better performance – and a jump start on the competition. Here are some of our advertisers’ top reasons for upgrading:

• Discover local opportunities: Use the location bid adjustment to easily and effectively engage with users based on location and proximity. This allows you to find and optimize for pockets of revenue you may not have even known existed.
  
  After upgrading to enhanced campaigns and leveraging geo bid adjustments, Peter Hughes, Manager of SEM at Constant Contact stated, “Suddenly, we realized that California has a great cluster of small and medium sized businesses.  Cool - we’ve already geo-targeted that.  But guess what?  Who knew that North Dakota had such a great ROI.  In the old, legacy world, I never would have figured it out because it did not fit into my selective scaling model.”


• Expose the true power of mobile: Implement a mobile bid adjustment to make sure you’re driving the right value for on-the-go consumers while gaining better insight into the results mobile can drive for you.
  
  American Apparel upgraded early to reach customers across all screens. They started by setting mobile bid adjustments at 100% and saw impressive results.  Since the upgrade, mobile conversions have grown 2X and aggregate click-through-rate has increased 7%.  Sean Singleton, Marketing Manager, stated, “We are going from trial to fine-tuning the way we execute our multi-device marketing strategy.  With enhanced campaigns, it’s very easy to test and iterate so we are quickly establishing internal best practices in terms of how to best run enhanced campaigns.”


• Drive more leads through calls: Use call extensions and measure calls as conversions to drive cost-efficient leads while providing a better ad experience for your customers.
  
  Woodbridge, a financial investment firm, took advantage of upgraded call extensions and new reporting features, increasing the volume of calls from smartphones from 20% to 57%, with overall smartphone leads almost doubling.  In addition, conversion rates from both desktop and mobile devices increased by 6%.


• Reach new audiences on the Google Display Network with powerful bidding:  Drive impression share to a specific audience using custom display bids across characteristics like demographics, interest categories or topics.
  
  Stathis Konstantinidis, who runs Global Marketing at Westwing, said, “With the upgrade to enhanced campaigns we have greater insight into how our converting audience looks on adgroup level. This is very important to us as we have quite a distinct idea of our target group. We can use this information in order to push the impression share of our ads within the converting audience and decrease the impressions within the less performing audience for driving conversions & decreasing the CPLs.”


• Manage campaigns in less time: Dive into enhanced campaigns to see how the powerful features work together to streamline your workflow and get you to happy hour sooner.
  
  Dutch shoe retailer, Schuurman Schoenen, reduced its total number of campaigns by 60% and dramatically cut its marketing team’s workload.  “I used to spend twice as much time to maintain and fine-tune campaigns,” says Kayo Klein Obbink, Schuurman Schoenen’s online marketer.

Improvements to the upgrade center
In April, we announced the enhanced campaigns upgrade center to help you transition from legacy campaigns to enhanced campaigns. We’re introducing some additional features, rolling out over the next week, that will make upgrading even easier and give you greater control over the merging process:

• Increased flexibility when copying keywords: When merging campaigns, have increased control over how keywords are copied (or not copied) from the mobile to the desktop campaign.
• Automatic labelling of newly copied keywords: When keywords, ads, or ad groups are copied or merged, they will be labelled as having been modified by the upgrade center.
• Uninterrupted keyword level tracking: When you have two matching campaigns with different mobile and desktop keyword-level destination URLs, they will be merged automatically. The mobile URL will show on mobile phones and the desktop URL will show on non-mobile.
• ... and coming soon: Bulk upload functionality: Ad extensions and ad groups will soon be exportable to AdWords Editor.

We hope that the Upgrade Center and other resources we’ve shared will give you the tools you need to ease the transition to enhanced campaigns.

Don’t wait to upgrade
We will begin automatically upgrading all legacy campaigns on July 22nd, 2013.  Please continue to share your feedback with us as you are going through the upgrade process.

Posted by Andy Miller, Head of Mobile Search Solutions