Yesterday was the big day. July 22 marked the deadline for the roughly 2 million Adwords campaigns that have held out on converting to Adwords Enhanced and will be automatically upgraded. Google had blatantly stated the that yesterday was a hard deadline for the last 25 percent of Adwords users to migrate, but as per usual, the process will actually occur over a long period.
In an Inside Adwords blog post about the change, Google explained, “…starting today, we will begin upgrading all remaining campaigns automatically, bringing everyone onto the new AdWords platform. As with many product launches, the rollout will be gradually completed over several weeks.”
The forced upgrade brings about quite a few changes in how you should manage your campaigns, and to help everyone get started, Search Engine Watch brought together a group of professionals in the field to offer their advice.
Google also offered their own suggestions.
- Review your mobile bid adjustments – For most campaigns, the auto-upgrade default is based on bids from similar advertisers. You will need to visit the ‘Settings’ tab to optimize for your business.
- Identify unwanted keyword duplication in overlapping campaigns – If you previously were using similar legacy campaigns for every device type, it is suggested you identify matching campaigns and remove any unwanted duplicate keywords in the enhanced campaign.
- Review Display Network campaigns – You will want to verify that your display ads are reaching users on all desired devices and that you are using the correct bidding strategies.
- Explore the Enhanced Campaign features – It is recommended you try out upgraded sitelinks and upgraded call extensions to start. Then you can further boost results by creating mobile preferred ads and setting bid adjustments for location and time.
