Google AdWords Enhanced Campaigns: The Benefits, Drawbacks and Implications

Today Google announced enhanced AdWords campaigns, a significant upgrade that gives local businesses more flexibility and control in how they reach consumers. It also highlights Google’s desire to make mobile advertising more appealing to small businesses.

What’s new?
The new enhanced campaigns essentially offer businesses the ability to streamline and fine-tune their AdWords campaigns to deliver relevant and timely ads based on signals like their location, time of day and device type. Google offers this example:

A breakfast cafe wants to reach people nearby searching for “coffee” or “breakfast” on a smartphone. Using bid adjustments, with three simple entries, they can bid 25% higher for people searching a half-mile away, 20% lower for searches after 11am, and 50% higher for searches on smartphones. These bid adjustments can apply to all ads and all keywords in one single campaign.

Another key feature of enhanced campaigns is optimization for varying user contexts. For example, a business with physical locations and website can show ads with click-to-call and location extensions to users searching on their smartphones; users searching on a PC will be shown an ad for the company’s e-commerce site. This can now be done in a single campaign.

Also included in the rollout of enhanced AdWords campaigns is advanced reporting to measure new conversion types