Google Updates In Adwords© and Analytics 2013

Damn Google would you slow down for a minute with some of these updates!

Dont be evil.  Its the Google Mantra and some times I just don’t know.  I just got off a call with Google Adwords support team discussing the new “Enhanced” campaigns that will be forced into all campaigns in June of 2013.

Currently, the pace at which updates are pushed that restrict the flow of information and take away many advanced targeting features that drove higher conversion rates doesn’t seem to be helping the advertisers and will mostly work to fill Google coffers.  If you are not testing your campaign, your segments, and your webpages, your campaigns will have very poor results.

However, these updates Google is forcing leaves me scratching my head. The greatest problem I see with Adwords in general is that anyone can turn it on and waste their money.

But these 3 enhanced campaign updates will definitely waste your money:

1) Forcing advertisers to include mobile is foolish for 1 simple reason, not all businesses need or should target mobile.  Mobile has very low conversion rates in many verticals and will be wasteful.

2) Search queries on desktop are different than mobile and conversion rates are primarily attributed to the keyword.  Forcing advertisers into a situation where all keywords are thought of as equal will only lower the conversion rate and kill mobile performance

3) Segmenting locations and geographic zones is very important to get more conversion and reduce the cost per acquisition.  With the new updates, Google is making the recommendation to advertisers they need only 1 campaign to target everywhere which is just wrong.

 

3 Features in Enhanced Campaigns that are major improvements:

1) The first feature that is extremely beneficial is the enhancement to bid adjustments.  The more precise your bidding, the better you will fair in the Adwords auction.

2) Reporting click to call metric as a new column in reports will give advertisers a better view of ad performance against inbound phone calls. However, it is highly recommended that you use a dynamic call tracking tool such as Kiss Metrics, Ifbyphone, or Powermyanalytics.com

3) Adgroup level site links.  Sitelinks have much higher CTR’s but are currently restricted to 1 per campaign.  Kudo’s to Google for bringing sitelinks down to the Adgroup level.

Adwords© and Analytics are powerful tools but the engineers seem to forgot the needs from entrepreneurs to larger brands; what makes us unique is our ability for specialization of our skill sets.  Your tools should remain feature reach, allowing us to choose the best options for customization or our processes using your advertising platform to target our marketing and work on improveing the user experience.

For most, and I mean every company except for 1 last year, knew what the hell is really going on in digital marketing. The Google Certification Program keeps you honest with your study habits however, the test and study materials are always 2 or 3 evolution’s behind current versions.