Among the most common tasks that new AdWords advertisers can find daunting is simply starting a new campaign. Just in the initial campaign setup screen (before you even begin to create your actual ad groups and ads), you’re presented with 22 separate choices! We recently created a series of posts dedicated to determining the right Google AdWords settings for your campaign, but as you might have noticed, Google introduced a new look to their interface recently.
In this post, we’ll walk through a couple of subtle but important differences that have been introduced with the new interface that you can leverage when setting up a campaign.
What’s New in the AdWords Campaign Settings?
On the whole the new interface does improve the workflow of setting up a new campaign, introducing elements like ad extensions right in the initial setup process so that newer advertisers are sure to include them in their campaigns. Additionally, there are a few new options in how you target and display your ads with the new interface.
Flexible Reach on the AdWords Display Network
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Flexible reach is a new campaign setting that allows you to determine how your ads show by choosing your settings at the ad group level instead of the campaign level. From the AdWords help menu:
Once you've selected this option, you can choose to use your targeting methods (such as placements or topics) for targeting your ads or for bidding only.
For new campaigns: This change will apply to all your ad groups.
For existing campaigns:
Your existing ad groups will keep your existing campaign setting ("Broad reach" or "Specific reach"), as long as you don't add or delete targeting methods. If you make any changes to your targeting methods, the ad group will start using the new flexible reach setting.
All your new ad groups will have the flexible reach setting by default.
This can be useful if you want to create a single campaign that includes ad groups with different targeting – for instance you might want to have one ad group that targets specific placements and another that targets all placements based on keywords. Previously you’d have to break these out into separate campaigns, but now you can have them live under a single campaign.
New Ad Rotation Settings
As we covered a few months back, Google made some changes to the way they handle ad rotation. Since that post, they’ve updated the ad rotation to allow ads to run for 90 days, which is a major improvement for advertisers and makes the setting significantly more useful again:
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New Keyword Matching Options
Along the same lines, Google recently announced a potentially dramatic change to the way AdWords deals with phrase and exact match types. As Larry’s post mentions you can still roll back these updates within the new campaign settings if you know where to look within the advanced settings, keyword matching options section:
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These new options and knowing your way around the new interface seem like small matters, but having a solid understanding of where and what these different items are can have a tangible impact on your AdWords campaigns.
About the Author
Tom Demers is co-founder and managing partner at Measured SEM, a boutique Boston SEO and PPC agency offering search marketing consulting services including pay-per-click account management, comprehensive SEO audits, content marketing strategies, SEO reputation management and link building services and strategies for a variety of specific niches such as SEO for B2B companies.
You can learn more about how Measured SEM can help your business by getting in touch with Tom directly via email at tom at measuredsem.com, or by following him on Twitter.
This post originated on the WordStream Blog. WordStream provides keyword tools for pay-per click (PPC) and search engine optimization (SEO) aiding in everything from keyword discovery to keyword grouping and organization.