Google Enhanced Campaigns: Understanding & Using Bid Adjustments
By: Carla Elvir, Senior Paid Search Analyst
What are Enhanced Campaigns?
Enhanced Campaigns are new types of Google AdWords campaigns that make it possible to target multiple devices in a simplified manner. With the older Legacy Campaigns, it was considered a best practice to separate campaigns when bidding on different devices and locations. Since the launch of Enhanced Campaigns, these settings can be handled in a single campaign, allowing for different bidding by device and by location. Enhanced Campaigns help advertisers and hotels serve more relevant ads and reach the right audience based on context, rather than solely targeting a specific device.
What is a bid adjustment?
Enhanced Campaigns provide the ability to assign value to potential customers (or guests in our case) in the form of bid adjustments. Bid adjustments are a percentage change in bids that allow increasing or decreasing of bids for searches occurring on mobile devices, days and time, and locations. In addition, these bid adjustments can be combined or stacked. In certain situations a click may be worth more coming from a desktop, in a specific location, or at a certain time. Enhanced Campaigns allow advertisers to optimize ads based on some or all of the contexts from this example. Below are the three different types of bid adjustments:
Device
Out of the three types of bid adjustments, mobile is the only mandatory bid adjustment. Basically, ads will be served to all devices, but it is possible to opt out of mobile device targeting. To opt out of mobile device targeting, the bid must be set to -100%. The option to target tablets individually is no longer available because desktops and tablets are now grouped together.
Location
Location bid adjustments are Enhanced Campaigns' way of geotargeting. Similar to Legacy Campaigns, it is still possible to separate campaigns by location, but now multiple locations can be targeted in one campaign. The bid can be set lower or higher based on the location targeted. The advertiser should consider the value of the click coming from that specific location. For example, a hotel in Schulenburg, Texas sees most of its business from truckers or travelers driving on I-10. They are already targeting the United States with a $3.00 bid. Because a searcher near the hotel is more likely to convert than one located across the country, this searcher is considered more valuable, and therefore it would be worth it for them to increase the bid for that location. To target searchers like these, the advertiser would increase the bid by 50% for searches occurring within a 20 mile radius of the hotel. That means the advertiser is willing to pay up to $4.50 per click coming from that area.
Time
Bid adjustmentsfor time are beneficial when there is a time of the day that a searcher is most valuable to the specific business. For a restaurant these hours would be while the restaurant is open. For a hotel it may be at night, if they have data that shows most of their guests are walk in night bookings. Otherwise, this might not be that beneficial to hotels, as most searchers book months in advance, day and night, from home and the office.
Conclusion
Google announced the mandatory move over from Legacy to Enhanced Campaigns for July 22, 2013. Enhanced Campaigns were released months ago, but changes have continued to roll out since its launch and are still being made.
Sources:
http://www.location3.com/how-to-use-enhanced-campaigns-bid-adjustments/
About Vizergy®
For more than 20 years, Vizergy has served the hospitality industry with leading marketing technologies, knowledgeable talent and exceptional service for clients worldwide. The company deploys complete travel life-cycle marketing solutions from conversion-optimized website design to award-winning digital marketing programs, reservation solutions, media planning and execution. Vizergy's platform is touted as the #1 digital marketing system – easy to use, turnkey and SMART, and continually enhanced with tools to help hotels compete and maximize revenue. At Vizergy, hospitality marketing is not only our mission, it's our sole focus.
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