The Search Marketer’s Guide for Migrating to Google Enhanced Campaigns: Best Practices, Part 1

With the July 22, 2013 migration deadline just around the corner, every search marketer is paying close attention to Google enhanced campaigns. We have yet to realize the full impact they will make, but one thing is clear – it is best to migrate early and armed with a plan.



To help create your plan of attack, download our white paper, “The Search Marketer’s Guide for Migrating to Google Enhanced Campaigns,” and read on for a selection of 11 best practices from our team of experts here at Marin Software.



Best Practice #1 – Maintain Historical Quality Scores

Quality Score estimates reflect a keyword’s overall performance across devices. Therefore, migrating to enhanced campaigns does not result in a loss of historical Quality Score information as long as keyword, creative, landing page, and device combinations remain the same. However, if your device combinations change or if you decide to merge matching campaigns, your Quality Scores will update to an average of the keywords’ original campaign Quality Scores, weighted by search volume.





Best Practice #2 - Separate Location-Targeted Campaigns

At this time, advertisers are not required to merge separate, location-targeted campaigns. Advertisers that have matching campaigns targeting separate locations should continue to segment these campaigns by location target. This will enable optimal bid calculations based on performance by location, rather than relying on campaign-level location bid adjustments.





Best Practice #3 - Adjust Campaign Daily Budgets

Upon merging your matching campaigns, your enhanced campaign daily budgets will likely need to be increased due to the additional click volume from expanded device targeting. Add the daily budget of the sibling campaigns to the parent campaign, and review the budget of the parent campaign to ensure it meets your business requirements. You can make adjustments from there based on your goals and the results you’re seeing.





Best Practice #4 – Calculate Optimal Mobile Bid Adjustments

If you previously separated your campaigns by device target, you can now set a mobile bid adjustment at the campaign or group level to bid on mobile devices separately from desktop and tablet devices. Mobile bid adjustments are set as a percentage of the keyword-level (desktop and tablet) bid. See our white paper for more details on these percentages.





Best Practice #5 – Utilize Time-of-Day Bid Adjustments

When it comes to scheduling your bids, there are a couple things to remember. First, scheduling reflects the account time zone and not the user’s time zone. Second, scheduling is applied across all devices regardless of performance. Therefore, we recommend applying a bid adjustment that accounts for the average performance between devices.





Next time: Check back soon to see six more best practices or download the white paper, “The Search Marketers’ Guide for Migrating to Google Enhanced Campaigns,” to get our full guide today.