6 Best Practices for Mobile Optimized Enhanced Campaigns

The growth in mobile adoption and incorporation of mobile search into daily consumer activities continues to drive innovation in paid search, most noticeably with Google enhanced campaigns. Though the impact of enhanced campaigns has been mixed, capitalizing on new revenue opportunities in this multi-device world requires search marketers to remain agile and efficient—focusing their efforts on optimizing for the mobile experience. The following best practices will help advertisers engage their mobile users and acquire more revenue with enhanced campaigns:

1. Optimize the mobile experience: Ensure that your text-based creative for high-volume groups are optimized for both desktop and mobile devices. For example, your mobile creative text might include geographic modifiers like “New York” or “San Francisco” depending on your location targets. Mobile-specific call-to-actions such as “Call now” or “Visit a local branch” are also effective in increasing customer engagement.Most importantly, your website should also be optimized to provide specific content for smartphone versus desktop and tablet users. This can be a large project and has important implications for how you present your brand, products, and services. Leveraging responsive web design and being concise with content throughout your site is essential. Making the store locator and other popular landing pages more prominent for smartphone users can reduce bounce rate while facilitating a positive mobile experience.
2. Establish mobile-specific key performance indicators: Smartphone users may not interact with your website in the same way as desktop and tablet users, but their visits are still valuable. Brand-related searches or interest in pricing, availability, or product information may be part of an in-store or near-store purchase process and should be considered intermediate conversion events. Assigning proxy values to these events is critical to understanding engagement and true keyword and device-level ROI, especially when it comes time to calculate optimal bids.
3. Report on performance by device: Leverage the {device} ValueTrack parameter to ensure that conversions and revenue can be accurately attributed to the device the user clicked and converted from. Depending on your tracking solution and revenue integration, make sure {device} is properly accounted for or tracking issues may occur.
4. Leverage single-keyword ad groups: By splitting out keywords with significantly different desktop versus mobile performance into separate ad groups, you can calculate group-level mobile bid adjustments that function as keyword-level mobile bid adjustments. When identifying keywords to split out, focus specifically on high volume keywords (thousands of clicks per month) that also vary significantly in desktop versus mobile performance.
5. Automate mobile bid adjustment calculations: Deploy a bidding solution that automatically calculates optimal group-level mobile bid adjustments based on business goals and requirements. When combined with keyword level bid calculations, this enables you to maximize conversions or revenue across all devices.
6. Deploy upgraded ad extensions: Google sitelinks provide advertisers with richer, more relevant ads that engage users and enhance brand value and targeted keywords. Leverage campaign and ad group-level sitelinks to enable users to reach deeper and more targeted content on your website. Sitelinks can also dramatically improve click-through rates and conversion rates.

With mobile adoption increasing, it’s no surprise that 70% of mobile searchers use click-to-call. To help facilitate this behavior and increase on-the-go engagement, implement call extensions across your campaigns. Creating a direct way for mobile users to quickly and easily contact your business is an effective strategy for driving customers to your brick-and-mortar locations or guiding them through the conversion funnel. As with all ad extensions, be sure to implement an appropriate call tracking solution to tie back ROI.

Last but not least, Google made a recent update to Ad Rank which now takes into account the expected impact from ad extensions and formats. In other words, ad extensions can now have a positive impact on the position of your ad on the search results page.

Capitalizing on additional revenue opportunities in a new and somewhat untested search landscape will require a comprehensive approach to enhanced campaigns. Continued investment in ad technology and efficient execution of the above best practices will ultimately drive success and win the battle for revenue in this multi-device world.