Recently Google AdWords has introduced enhanced campaigns which make it easier to vary the bidding between different devices. This works best with responsive designs (when the same content of a website is shown to all users, but the layout is device dependent).
When initially implemented this caused difficulties for any business with a separate mobile site as this meant you could not land on the best pages for mobile viewers. Businesses with separate mobile sites were at a real disadvantage after converting to enhanced campaigns.
After feedback from the first advertisers to try this out, Google introduced the new ValueTrack parameter. This was done to overcome shortcomings in the initial implementation of enhanced campaigns which:
1) Did not enable device specific landing pages at the keyword level
2) Did not allow effective measurement of the campaign by device
Therefore if you have separate pages for laptops and mobile you need to use the ValueTrack parameter to sort the two landing pages.
This is best shown by way of an example.
Suppose your ad for “red widgets” wishes to land on www.mysite.com/widgets/red/ for laptops and on m.mysite.com/widgets/red/ for mobile, then for legacy campaigns you would use two campaigns and use the following adcopy urls:
- http://www.mysite.com/widgets/red/
- http://m.mysite.com/widgets/red/
But when you move to the enhanced campaigns you need to change the adcopy urls to
- {ifmobile:http://m.mysite.com/widgets/red/{{ifnotmobile:http://www.mysite.com/widgets/red/}
In terms of tracking and measuring the performance by keyword it is possible to use the {ifmobile{ and {ifnotmobile} tags to specify your own device level parameters.
Enhanced campaigns are here to stay – they were needed by Google to quickly boost advertising revenue on mobile devices. Google have listened to feedback and introduced new ValueTrack parameters enabling advertisers to again specify different urls for website and mobile.
ExtraDigital can help move your AdWords campaigns onto the enhanced campaign structure in the nest way for your business and at the right time.
