What Google’s Enhanced Campaigns Mean for Performance Marketers
By Ori Carmel | VP, Strategy & Performance
Google announced major changes yesterday to AdWords, rolling out what it is calling “enhanced campaigns.” The changes are designed to help marketers “more simply and smartly manager [their] ad campaigns in today’s multi-device world.”
There are two main parts marketers should consider regarding the impact the AdWords changes will have on their work and client campaigns.
First, the changes open up (or rather brings Google up to speed) with a new and improved revenue and ad distribution model, mostly focused around mobile.
Second, the changes bring the advertising and marketing industry one step closer to a comprehensive inter-connected attribution model of consumption. That’s the Holy Grail that marketers have been searching for since the dawn of modems.
Google AdWords Enhanced should help marketers by providing new bid adjustments, customizable ad formatting and simplified reporting. If you have been hesitant to push towards mobile ad distribution, fear no more. Google will help you adjust ads to fit almost all devices, and report back on performance. All of this, of course, should translate to more distribution, more bids, higher budgets and higher revenues (at higher margins) for both marketers and Google.
However, this new initiative does not fully resolve the quest for a holistic consumer behavior attribution model. There are still outstanding questions about tying mobile, desktop, tablet and offline behaviors into a coherent and complete model. There are also more specific questions about Enhanced’s visibility (tablets and desktops are grouped together, just as one peculiar example), which should be addressed by Google as this product matures.
There are certainly a lot of questions this latest Google update does not yet quite answer. It does, however, open the door to a new world of mobile distribution for many advertisers, and certainly does take us a step further in understanding, as an industry, how consumers make decisions, and what role do different devices have in that process.
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