Google’s offering new features to its popular AdWords tool with the addition of Enhanced Campaigns. These enhancements were announced in February, and July 22nd, 2013 was the official rollout date that Google announced as the day they would update all campaigns that had not been updated manually. In our latest installment, we’ll tell you what’s new and what you need to know about upgrading your current campaigns. 

Let’s start with why Google decided to make these changes. Google’s goal is “to make it easier for advertisers to promote marketing messages based on people’s context,” according to the company.

Translation: You don’t have to run a bunch of campaigns to target different devices and locations.

You can now bid differently based on device or location within the same campaign. So if your AdWords account looks like ours, that’ll take a lot of the campaigns and combine them.

You can manage these differences in bidding by setting allowances for a percentage of your default bids. This ranges from -100% (prevents ads from showing on mobile devices) to +300% (three times the prevalence) on mobile devices.

This saves you time, and allows for better management of campaigns and overall metrics.

When adding ads, you now have an option of restricting the ad to only mobile devices. Along with custom bidding within campaigns, you can also select which ads will show up where. 

Campaign settings now allow for targeting specific carriers and operating systems. For instance, an app that is exclusively available on the Apple App Store would only show up on iOS compatible devices.

There are a lot of great features to these updates, but the aforementioned are the biggest differences you will notice when creating campaigns. 

Easy-to-follow, detailed instructions on how to upgrade (assuming Google hasn’t ‘helped’ you along already) can be found here.