During a Webinar yesterday, BIA/Kelsey’s Senior Analyst Mike Boland, along with Marchex VP of Operations Travis Fairchild and Head of SEM Cody Kunning discussed how businesses and those managing online and mobile advertising campaigns can best maximize performance with Google’s AdWords Enhanced Campaigns, which are set to kick off on July 22nd.

Enhanced Campaigns is a topic that has been talked about quite a bit over the last few months. It was discussed at BIA/Kelsey’s Leading In Local conference in March (read Leading In Local 2013: Enhanced Campaigns: Google Speaks), and Mikel Boland has written about it extensively (see Google “Enhances” Cross-Platform SEM: What Does it Mean? and More on Google’s Paid Search “Enhancements”: The SMB Angle)

Marchex brought additional firepower to the discussion. Fairchild, Kunning and team have spent the last several months testing hundreds of customer campaigns on the new AdWords Enhanced platform. Here are some of the key takeaways that advertisers must be aware of:

1. Do not wait to begin testing.. Boland, Fairchild and Kunning stressed throughout the Webinar that testing is critical to understanding how these changes will impact the way your advertising budget gets allocated. Google’s Enhanced Campaigns rolls out on July 22, 2013. The changes being made to AdWords are significant. If you fail to get the support you need now, you run the risk of wasting valuable advertising dollars when Enhanced Campaigns is launched.

2. Why is Google doing this? For advertisers, the new features should have some benefits and make management less manual. But one of the main reasons is that mobile advertiser adoption is accelerated through Enhanced Campaigns, because advertisers are faced with forced inclusion in mobile for all AdWords campaigns. This should help correct what Google sees as an imbalance between time spent in mobile and actual mobile advertising (see chart below). Google should see additional revenue from these changes as well. Supply and demand has kept mobile ad rates depressed. Greater mobile adoption, and higher performing mobile ad campaigns should help increase rates.

3. You will lose some of the ability you had to manage advertising by device. However, there are ways around this. Google has announced a mobile bid modifier, for example, that allows you to still run detail mobile campaigns. There also are geographic bid modifiers. Marchex recommends that advertisers locate the trigger points for budget allocation in order to gain some control over targeting by device. You will not be able to set a separate budget, as in the past, so how you set up your account will be key. This is why BIA/Kelsey and Marchex recommend you get started now. The learning curve is unavoidable.

4. Enhanced Campaigns require time for setup, familiarity, and the advertiser must know where customers convert and what they convert on. Device type, ad copy, device type landing pages, device type extensions are some of the key items. In addition to becoming proficient with setup, using third-party tools for tracking will be very important.

5. Call analytics is even more important than ever before, especially if you want to reduce volatility in CPL.

6. Both BIA/Kelsey and Marchex anticipate that CPCs in competitive verticals will increase after Google Enhanced Campaigns launches for three reasons. Reason 1: Advertisers will arbitrarily inflate mobile ad mods w/out analyzing return on spend to try to gain position. Reason 2: Advertisers will not properly optimize for quality score per device. Reason 3: Advertisers will not properly bucket keywords into similar bid ad groups to use mobile modifiers effectively.

7. Lastly, because Google’s Enhanced Campaigns will likely bring about CPC increases and potential headaches for advertisers, there is some potential for Bing to gain some market share from Google. Some advertisers have started to deploy more with Bing and have achieved favorable ROI. Boland, Fairchild and Kunning all agreed that increased competition can only help improve services and results for customers. However, it remains to be seen if Bing can make significant headway against Google.

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