With only a few days to go before the 22nd July deadline, advertisers must upgrade any legacy Google Adwords PPC campaigns to ‘enhanced’ status, or face Google automatically changing them without your input.
To help during this key transition period, 8 Million Stories have compiled a quick five step guide, outlining all the key steps you need to take in order to upgrade in time.
1. Run benchmarking reports – before you upgrade, run reports to establish your current performance. This will ensure you can assess any impact on your campaigns post transition. Key metrics to look at will be your CPCs and average positions for desktop, tablet and mobile clicks. You can easily find this in Adwords by clicking on the Campaigns, Ad Groups or Keywords tab (depending on what level you want the data) and clicking on the Segment sub-tab and selecting device (shown below):
2. Merge duplicate campaigns & amend budgets – if you have any campaigns that are currently duplicates but target different devices – or that may compete with each other after the upgrade – these now need to be merged into one primary campaign. Be sure to check that all keywords, ad copy and ad extensions that you want to keep are all carried over to the primary campaign. Google have created an Upgrade Center (you can find this in the campaigns tab) which you can use to help merge the appropriate campaigns. You will also need to adjust the budgets of your primary campaigns by adding the budgets of your merged campaigns.
3. Change your campaign settings to Enhanced – once all your duplicated/competing campaigns have been merged, you need change your campaign settings to Enhanced status. This can be done individually in Adwords, or you can do one bulk change using Adwords Editor;
4. Set mobile bid adjustments – next you need to decide what you are happy to pay for mobile clicks. If you do not want to appear for mobile searches, set your mobile bid to -100%. Bid adjustments are only available at campaign and ad group level, so unfortunately you can’t set them for individual keywords. If you previously had mobile campaigns set up, it may be worth reviewing what your previous CPCs were at ad group level, and using those to calculate the most appropriate bid in your new ad groups.
5. Customise sitelinks, app extensions & ads for mobile – if you have specific ads or ad extensions that you would prefer to show on mobiles, you can specify this. These will be given preference on mobile devices over your standard extensions, however they may also show on desktop and tablets. More information can be found here –https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/2954783?ctx=tltp
Voila! Your campaigns will now be upgraded to enhanced status! Over the coming weeks you should run new reports to compare your performance data (especially CPCs and conversion metrics) after the transition. To find out how you can leverage your new campaigns read our blog post “Embracing Change : How PPC Marketers Can Make the Most of Enhanced Campaigns”