30/01/2014
Workarounds To Make Enhanced Campaigns More Flexible
Does It Make Sense To Target Tablets & Desktops In The Same Campaign?
This debate topic was a tongue-in-cheek jab at Enhanced Campaigns which make the answer largely irrelevant since splitting out desktops and tablets into separate campaigns is no longer possible. Google has said that tablets and desktops should be treated the same. But what did the panelists have to say?
The majority of the panel agreed that combining tablets and desktops is not completely crazy because while there still is a clear distinction between the devices, it is shrinking by the day.
Case in point: all the people in the session were using new PCs running Windows 8 that can be physically reconfigured into either a laptop or a tablet. In this case, it’s the same device, and the main difference is in how the screen is used. If the user was using it as a tablet to do research and then wanted to convert it to a laptop to make a purchase, all they would need to do is flip the screen.
This raised the point that rather than targeting tablets and desktops where the experience may be converging, it might make more sense to be able to target based on the screen size of the device. We can all dream that this form of segmentation will come to AdWords, right?
In my own experience, I have seen the results on tablets vary wildly; sometimes they outperform the desktop and sometimes they underperform. So, while I’d rather still be able to set separate bids for tablets, I do agree that having the same ads will not necessarily make my results worse.
Workarounds For Targeting Tablet Devices In Enhanced Campaigns
It may still be desirable to show a different landing page to tablet users, which luckily doesn’t require making a separate ad for tablets. Instead, detect tablet devices on your landing page and then customize the experience by suggesting the user download your app or use a tablet-optimized version of your site.
One of the easiest ways to determine whether someone who clicked an ad was using a desktop, tablet or mobile is to use the {device} ValueTrack parameter. You can append this to your destination URL, and then Google will replace it with either ‘m’ for mobile, ‘t’ for tablet, or ‘c’ for computer. Based on that, you can vary up the content of your landing page.
And, if you’re concerned like me that bids should take the device type into consideration, you can still use Google’s Conversion Optimizer or Enhanced CPC, which will raise and lower bids automatically based on the expected likelihood of a conversion considering the particular details of the click, including: time, location, other words in the query, and device. Even if you use your own bid management technology, Enhanced CPC can be used as a layer on top of that.
How Significant Is The Loss Of Mobile Device & Carrier Targeting?
While Enhanced Campaigns still allow advertisers to use a different ad text and landing page when their ads appear on mobile phones, the ability to target to specific devices (e.g., iPhone vs. Nexus 4) and to target different carriers (e.g., AT&T vs. T-Mobile) is now completely gone.
Considering that Google’s own Analytics Evangelist, Avinash Kaushik’s, says, “All data in aggregate is ‘crap’,” to make the point that online marketing success is highly dependent on smart segmentation that leads to actionable insights, it’s a shame that these layers of segmentation have been taken away from advertisers.
Device and carrier targeting were reasonable substitutes for demographic targeting, something not offered for AdWords search ads. For example, you could venture that iPhone users are more likely early adopters than BlackBerry users, and AT&T subscribers probably have higher incomes than Boost subscribers. I once met a locksmith who told me he had tremendous success targeting ads for the keyword ‘lost keys’ to iPhones because those users were more likely to pay his higher fee for rush service.
