The PPC obsessed folks of the world received a bit of a win yesterday when Google announced that they will be releasing ad group level mobile bid adjustments soon. This comes on the heels of the release of enhanced campaigns where mobile was set to be included by all campaigns by default, a change that was accompanied by mobile bid adjustments at the campaign level only.
According to the post announcing the change, we will now be able to change bids at the ad group level “to provide more control and precision over bids.” The change will hit your accounts in mid-May, with a new version of the editor hitting shortly thereafter (although a more specific time frame for the editor update hasn’t been released yet).
This change is great for a few reasons:
- Having the ability to bid at the ad group level as opposed to the campaign level is a boon for us managers in the accounts every day. More control is always a good thing. (Unless you’ve seen the kid from this Twilight Zone episode. That’s probably too much control.)
- It reinforces a belief that I currently hold that ad groups should be pretty small. I actually prefer them to be really small (I usually go 1-2 keywords on a new campaign build out, but that might be too extreme for some). If you have an ad group that only contains one keyword, then this new change basically amounts to keyword level bidding options. Which is so great.
- (This is the biggest reason it’s great) This shows that Google’s listening to some of our concerns. This is a significant change, and I’m glad to have it. I am also glad to see the behavior that they’re willing to change things heading up to the launch. Thank you, Google.
ALSO, there was another juicy bit of news tucked away at the bottom of the news post that wasn’t highlighted so much in the rest of the text. The release date of enhanced campaigns has been pushed back! Subtly tucked in toward the end of the post was this little gem:
We will begin automatically upgrading all AdWords campaigns to enhanced campaigns starting on July 22, 2013.
We just got an extra six weeks + to get ourselves ready for the big launch! If there are more changes down the pike, I wonder if that would require even more time being added on.
The final thing to consider based on this news is how you should time your own transitions to enhanced. This change doesn’t go live until mid-May, so it might make sense to wait until then. Google says in the post that advertisers shouldn’t wait to switch over as they’ll want to take advantage of everything that enhanced campaigns have to offer, which makes sense if you’re super into the geo and sitelinks stuff. But for those of us that are still on the fence, it might be best to wait it out and see what else changes. It’s pretty clear that there’s a lot of feedback and that some of it is being listened to. Odds are that something else will change.
Basically, if you’re the type of person who wants or needs a reason to procrastinate making the change to enhanced, you just got it. But you also have more time, and you’ll eventually have more control, which is definitely a step in the right direction.
