The biggest change with Enhanced Campaigns in Google AdWords is how we now bid for mobile and tablet devices.
Previously, we used to separate mobile and tablets into their own campaigns and set a budget for that particular campaign. However, since the introduction of Enhanced Campaigns, Google now forces you to put all devices into the same campaigns and you can then set your mobile bid adjustments accordingly.
So if you have a website that performs really well on mobile, you might want to increase the bids for that by, say, 25% or even 50%. Alternatively, if you have a website that performs really badly on mobile, then you might want to set the mobile bidding to -100% to ensure that there are no bids to go out for people viewing your ads – and therefore your website – from mobile devices.
With Google now requiring us to put all devices into the one campaign, this is basically them telling us that we need to be more smartphone savvy. In fact, statistics show that around 65% of consumers now have access to smartphones and browse the internet on these devices. Therefore, Google wants to ensure that when they send someone through to a website from mobile, the user experience is great on that particular device.
In addition, around 80% of smartphone users these days will use a multi-screen experience. So they might start by searching on their mobile device, but then later move to a desktop device to make a purchase. In fact, Google statistics show that 59% of users start their journey on a mobile device and finish it on a desktop.
So, while people may continue to make most purchases on desktop devices – if you ignore mobile, you are probably cutting off about 59% of users who never find out about you in the first place and will not, therefore, go on to make a sale on your site. This makes it even more important to have a great website not only for a desktop but for a smartphone device as well.
The danger for healthcare marketers is to assume these moves may not affect us – that we’re not selling direct to consumers we’re educating HCPs (or whatever our online mission may be). But of course, we’re all consumers even if some of us are wearing a uniform and walking down a hospital corridor, so the odds are you may need to be more mobile friendly. Make sure that your site and ads are optimised for mobile. Make use of AdWords click-to-call extensions, where advertisers can have users just literally click on their ad and call their business directly straight from their mobile device.
So, are your site and AdWords campaign mobile friendly?
