Many folks who advertise on Google follow a certain trend – a Google AdWords campaign is set up and once the target reached, stopped. Some months down the line the campaign is started again. I won’t go into the merits of this strategy except to say that the only time this strategy won’t work for you is when Google makes significant changes to its AdWords Campaign Manager – like it has now.
Whenever Google announces changes to its AdWords policy or tools, be sure to check it all out. It may take away some of your time but that would be far better than receiving nothing for your ad spends. If you do not understand and reconfigure your AdWords campaign prior to running your AdWords campaign, Google will do it for you and it will do it in a way that is beneficial its business interest.
Google has already launched the Enhanced AdWords campaign manager. If you have not yet done so, as an advertiser on Google, you should double check your AdWords settings. While looking at several AdWords campaigns that had been automatically migrated by Google, I notice several serious bugs in Google’s bulk upgrade tool so do be careful.
When mass migrating to the enhanced version, Google automatically sets your AdWords campaign to include the mobile platform i.e. your AdWords campaign will also be displayed on the mobile phones irrespective of the readiness of your website to receive such clicks.
Result? You will have thousands of clicks coming from prospective customers who having arrived at your website, will not be able to view it well resulting in wasted opportunity. As of today, Google’s enhanced AdWords campaign manager is set to automatically target all platforms (desktops, tablets, and mobile devices). If you don’t wish to target a certain platform, you need to set the bid to a negative value i.e. -100%. So -100% against say mobile phones will exclude cell phones from your AdWords campaign.
In any case, since you can set only one link per campaign, I recommend running AdWords campaign for individual platforms separately. That way, it is easier to monitor your campaign. The results of all your AdWords campaigns will indicate which platforms are more profitable.
Google’s AdWords campaign manager is continuously being upgraded. Each time it upgrades the AdWords campaign manager, an email is sent to you with a summary of the changes and links to pages that contain more details. Don’t delete these emails before you read and understand the changes Google has made.
Hope you have a profitable AdWords campaign.
