It’s now the end of September, and clearly we’ve all survived the enhanced campaigns transition. As the dust continues to settle, now is a good time to take a look at what this change has meant for the industry.
Skai clients have had some great results in the post-migration era. As discussed during our webinar with Bon Mercado from Google, one of our lead-driven clients was able to reduce its average cost-per-click by 11% while driving more incremental traffic. One consumer packaged goods (CPG) advertiser saw a 329% increase in mobile and tablet traffic. Skai’s in-house search campaigns had stellar results as conversions increased while both cost-per-click and cost-per-acquisition dropped.
Previously, advertisers had to manage three individual campaigns to direct traffic to mobile, tablet, and desktop devices. Now they are left with one. This has some great advantages. For example, keyword expansion immediately affects all devices. Additionally, bid management can be done more quickly since there are fewer bids to set.
Although the new account structure means that advertisers have fewer total keywords to manage, the way that keywords relate to each other has fundamentally changed. Due to the introduction of the mobile bid adjustment (MBA)—which gives Google advertisers the ability to change bids to smart phones in relation to desktop and tablet bids—all of the keywords in a campaign or ad group are dependent on each other. Because of this fundamental change, the optimal adjustment for one keyword is not necessarily optimal for others.
With so many moving parts, bid management can easily become an overwhelming task to get right. Since we first got wind of enhanced campaigns, Skai made solving this challenge a top priority. We have introduced bid policies that are capable of optimizing not just the keyword bids, but also the mobile bid adjustments at the ad group level.
Our algorithms are able to determine the proper mix of keyword bids and mobile bid adjustments to produce the optimal overall result. This is accomplished by simultaneously analyzing the performance of the individual keywords on desktop and their aggregated ad group performance on mobile. Since the effective mobile bids are affected by two pieces—desktop bid and mobile bid adjustment—it’s important to set both at the same time when optimizing. Failing to do so can mean sub-optimal results and overspending.
To date, Skai has optimized the mobile bid adjustments for nearly 9 million ad groups!
At the end of the day, advertisers all want the same thing regardless of device… the best results. At Skai, that’s our goal. And, so far, so good!
How are you faring with enhanced campaigns, or, as they’re now called, campaigns?