As you may have heard, Google announced some fairly significant changes to their AdWords product today. What does this mean for your AdWords campaigns? Here it is simplified and boiled down to 3 main changes.

Change #1: Campaigns targeting all devices
With the rollout of Enhanced Campaigns, you will no longer have the ability to create campaigns that target only one device (mobile, tablets and desktops/laptops were the previous options). Google has determined that with the proliferation of search activity across all devices, they can make better judgments on searcher’s intent by time of day and the device searching on, and can therefore show the most appropriate ads from your campaign based on that data.

• Different ad formats will now live within the same campaign. So you can have your traditional desktop/laptop ads as well as mobile-optimized ads within the same account, and Google will show the appropriate one based on the device being used.
• You do have the option to bid differently by device. So you can bid higher or lower for mobile vs. desktop. Your Anvil team will be working closely with you to determine the best bidding strategies for each campaign and how we may want to reallocate budgets based on these changes.

Change #2: Advanced Ad Extension Rollout
Google has continued to provide additional features within ad extensions (sitelinks, location extensions, click to call, app downloads etc.). The following changes will be made to sitelinks:

• Advanced reporting on sitelinks. Until now, we’ve only been provided with aggregate data on how sitelinks perform. With the enhanced campaign rollout we’ll now see individual stats for each sitelink used in your ads, allowing us to better determine which sitelinks are resonating best with your customers.
• Sitelinks can now be scheduled. We can schedule sitelinks prior to a launch (great for sales or new product launches) and ensure the links are working properly ahead of time
• Ad Extensions can be prioritized for devices, meaning if you have both sitelinks and location extensions within your campaign, you can set the location extension to show only in mobile ads while the sitelinks show for traditional computers.

Change #3: New Conversion Types coming to AdWords
This change to AdWords is a little bit further down the road, but good to start thinking about now. Currently we have little information regarding the integration and implementation aspects of these conversion types, so stay tuned.

• Track downloads of books and music from your PPC ads
• Cross-Device conversion tracking
• In-Store conversion tracking

The main changes to enhanced sitelinks will start to become available in accounts this month, but a full migration to these changes is not necessary until June 2013. Anvil will be working closely with clients to develop a roadmap prior to transitioning accounts to ensure goals continue to be met through PPC campaigns. Please note – if you create a new campaign once the enhanced campaigns feature has been added to your account this month, you will need to manually opt-out of enhanced campaign targeting, otherwise all your existing campaigns will be transitioned to the new enhanced campaigns.

Please let us know if you have any additional questions. We will continue to follow this news closely as more information becomes available from Google.

For more information please reference the official blog post.