AdWords Enhanced Campaigns: mobile bids and what to restructure

The old model let advertisers build device-specific campaigns with their own budgets, bids, keywords and ad copy. Many accounts had two or three parallel copies of each campaign. Enhanced Campaigns collapse that into one, with three levers:

• Mobile bid adjustment at the campaign or ad group level, from -100 percent to +300 percent. Tablets cannot be adjusted separately; they now share the desktop bid.
• Location bid adjustments, from -90 percent to +300 percent, for any geographic target in the campaign.
• Ad schedule bid adjustments, by day and hour, replacing the old bid multipliers.

Adjustments stack multiplicatively. A $2.00 keyword bid with +20 percent for a city and -30 percent for mobile becomes $2.00 x 1.2 x 0.7 = $1.68 on a phone in that city. The one exception: the mobile adjustment of -100 percent switches phones off regardless of the others.

Other changes arrive with it. Mobile-preferred ads let you flag creative that should be shown on phones first. Upgraded sitelinks are set at the ad group level with their own reporting. Call extensions can be scheduled, and offer extensions and app extensions become available. Conversion counting adds calls of a minimum duration as a conversion type.

Do not upgrade until you have a clean view of how each device performs. Run these reports for the last 90 days, segmented by device.

Export everything to a spreadsheet. The upgrade preserves history, but the device split of legacy campaigns is easier to analyze now than after the merge.

The formula most advertisers should start with:

Mobile adjustment = (mobile value per click / desktop value per click) - 1

Value per click is conversion rate multiplied by average value per conversion. A worked example: desktop converts at 3.0 percent with a $120 average order, so $3.60 per click. Mobile converts at 1.5 percent with a $90 order, so $1.35 per click. The ratio is 0.375, so the adjustment is -62 percent (round to -60). If calls from mobile ads produce another $0.80 per click in tracked value, mobile is worth $2.15 per click and the adjustment becomes -40 percent.

Some decision rules:

1. Fewer than 30 mobile conversions in 90 days: start at -20 percent and revisit monthly.
2. Mobile site is not usable (no responsive or dedicated mobile pages, forms that need zooming): start at -70 to -100 percent and fix the site first.
3. Local businesses where a call is the conversion: often +10 to +50 percent, with call extensions and a call-only ad group.
4. Never set +300 percent "to win mobile." The auction on phones has fewer ad positions, two or three above the fold, so costs rise fast.

Set the adjustment at campaign level first. Move to ad group level only where an ad group has 50 or more mobile conversions and clearly different behavior.

The upgrade wizard lets you merge legacy mobile campaigns into their desktop twins. Before you accept that, decide what structure you actually want.

Merge when the mobile campaign is a copy of the desktop one with different bids. That is most of them. Take the desktop campaign as the survivor, apply the calculated mobile adjustment, and label the mobile campaign's best ad copy as mobile-preferred in the merged ad groups.

Keep separate when campaigns genuinely differ by geography or schedule, since those are still available as campaign settings. Also keep separate where budgets must be ring-fenced for different business units.

Rebuild when your account has accumulated near-duplicate keywords across campaigns, broad-match keywords with no negatives, and ad groups with 50-plus keywords. Enhanced Campaigns is the moment to move to tighter ad groups of 5 to 20 closely related keywords, add a shared negative keyword list, and remove keywords with zero conversions and more than $200 spent.

A migration checklist:

• Upgrade one mid-sized campaign first, watch it for two weeks, then do the rest.
• Rewrite ad copy for mobile-preferred ads: shorter benefit, a call-to-action that matches the device ("Call now" or "Get directions").
• Move sitelinks to ad group level where they can be specific, and add at least four per campaign; the upgraded format shows up to six on desktop.
• Confirm call extensions use a Google forwarding number so calls are counted.
• Recheck location targets; adjustments now let you bid up on your best ZIP codes instead of excluding the rest.
• Reset your conversion tracking checks the week after the upgrade; a few advertisers have reported code and column changes.

Expect average cost per click to shift. Mobile clicks have typically been 20 to 40 percent cheaper than desktop because fewer advertisers ran mobile campaigns. Once every advertiser is in the mobile auction by default, many with no adjustment at all, mobile CPCs will rise. Reasonable planning assumptions for the second half of 2013: mobile CPCs up 10 to 25 percent, overall account CPCs up 5 to 15 percent, with wide variation by industry. Set a review in the first week of August and rebalance adjustments once you have post-deadline data.

Tablets are the quieter problem. Tablet traffic is 10 to 20 percent of clicks for many consumer accounts and conversion rates are often somewhere between phone and desktop. Since you can no longer bid down, make sure tablet landing pages work: tap targets, no Flash, forms that do not break in Safari on iPad.

Accepting the default +0 percent. Google's default mobile adjustment is zero, which means you pay desktop prices for phone clicks that may convert at half the rate.

Setting -100 percent everywhere. Switching mobile off is a legitimate choice for businesses with unusable mobile pages, but many accounts have a meaningful phone-call conversion they have never tracked.

Merging without saving the data. Once legacy mobile campaigns are merged, the clean device history becomes harder to reconstruct.

Forgetting that adjustments multiply. A -50 percent location adjustment on top of -50 percent for mobile puts you at a quarter of your bid, usually below first-page minimums.

Waiting for July 22. Automatic upgrades apply Google's defaults. Your choices beat theirs.

We run the migration as a four-step program. Discover: we export device, location and schedule performance across the account, audit conversion tracking including calls, and review the mobile landing experience. Plan: we calculate adjustments per campaign, decide which campaigns to merge, keep or rebuild, and set a CPC and budget forecast for the second half of the year. Build: we execute the upgrade in waves, rewrite mobile-preferred ads and extensions, and where the mobile site is the bottleneck our web team fixes the landing pages at the same time. Improve: we review adjustments against fresh data every two weeks for the first two months, then monthly. Because growth, web and technology teams work together, a poor mobile conversion rate gets treated as a site problem to solve, not just a bid to lower.

A representative example is our performance marketing engagement, where an advertiser with dozens of parallel desktop and mobile campaigns needed a plan for the forced upgrade. We consolidated the structure, set mobile adjustments from a value-per-click model that included tracked calls, rebuilt the worst ad groups with tighter keyword sets and shared negatives, and paired the migration with mobile landing page fixes so the lower mobile bids could be raised again as conversion improved. The result was a simpler account the owner could actually manage.