Mobile Only Enhanced Campaigns

On the 22nd July 2013, Google finally forced everyone into using their new Enhanced Campaigns in Adwords. If you haven’t migrated already then Google will automatically migrate your campaigns over the coming days/weeks. Out of all the new features one of them has caused a real stir online amongst Adwords Professionals like ourselves and that’s the inability to run mobile only enhanced campaigns.

Before enhanced campaigns savvy Adwords users would run separate campaigns for desktop, mobile and tablets so they could target each one individually and also easily see how they perform.  Now I agree that as well as being useful this did create a lot of work on large campaigns and merging them seemed to get rid of a lot of this work.

However, we have a number of clients who ONLY want to target searches on mobiles, and desktop traffic would just be wasted. This is where it gets interesting with Advanced Campaigns and there’s easy way to do it.

As of writing this, if you want a mobile only campaign then you should:

a) set all ads in your ad group to mobile besides one of them which should be written for desktop. (This is because the mobile you select is just a preference and if all were mobile then there’s no preference because they’re all mobile and would therefore all show on ALL devices.)

b) reduce your max CPC by around 25% of what you would normally pay and set the mobile multiplier to 300%. If this is a new campaign then use the ‘First Page Bid Estimate’ as a guide. (The idea behind this is that your desktop bid isn’t high enough to get on the first page and the 300% multiplier help push your mobile bid up)

What happens though is a lot of the time you have to put your desktop bid so low to make sure you don’t get any impressions/clicks that having a 300% multiplier doesn’t even get you in the range to get any mobile clicks.

So this will help show your ads more on mobiles but certainly doesn’t stop desktop impressions. All in all, very very messy.

If you’re wondering why has Google done this, is it for the users?  Well, take into account that prior to Enhanced campaigns we were experiencing mobile CPCs on average 25-35% cheaper than desktop. Now that more people will be ‘forced’ into targeting mobiles with their ad campaigns more people are going to be in each ‘Ad auction’ therefore pushing up the price CPC’s – Food for Thought!

If like us, on top of all the lovely features Enhanced Campaigns bring us that help manage our accounts more effectively you’d still like a mobile only option, then feel free to leave Google some feedback via the link below….

https://services.google.com/fb/forms/ecfeedback/

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