In 2012, Google‘s advertising revenues were more than $40 billion, and the bulk of that was earned from their AdWords product.

Now Google has completely upgraded this key product to better focus on mobile and the rapidly growing multi-screen consumer behavior.

AdWords has always been the mainstay of Google’s business. It allows advertisers to easily purchase small ads that appear near search results on Google, as well as on Google’s partner network. Advertisers use a self-service portal to setup and manage the ads, although there is expert help available by phone from Google.

However, the AdWords ads looked exactly the same whether the consumer was seeing them on a PC, or happened to see them on a phone or a tablet. Clearly the needs of a typical consumer would vary depending on what device they were using. As Google explains:

“For example, a pizza restaurant probably wants to show one ad to someone searching for “pizza” at 1pm on their PC at work (perhaps a link to an online order form or menu), and a different ad to someone searching for “pizza” at 8pm on a smartphone a half-mile from the restaurant (perhaps a click-to-call phone number and restaurant locator). Signals like location, time of day, and the capabilities of the device people are using have become increasingly important in showing them the right ad.”

So Google recently launched Enhanced Campaigns for AdWords in an effort to make their ad service better optimized for today’s multi-device world. Some of the key benefits that Google claims for Enhanced Campaigns include:

• Ads optimized for various user contexts People on the move may well be looking for different things than people sitting at their desk. Enhanced Campaigns lets advertisers deliver the right ad text, sitelink, app or extension, without having to edit each campaign for every possible combination of devices, location and time of day.
• Better campaign management across multiple devices Given the optimization and flexibility of these ads, it is important that advertisers have a good system for easy management and control. Using the bid adjustments feature of Enhanced Campaigns, advertisers can manage bids for their ads across devices, locations, time of day and more all within a single campaign. This should give better management of campaigns and budgets.
• Advanced reports Finally, it is critical that advertisers be able to measure and report on their cross device campaigns. With Enhanced Campaigns Google is now offering enhanced reporting, including the tracking of interactions such as consumer phone calls and app downloads.

Enhanced Campaigns is just going live now, and within 6 months all AdWords campaigns will be switched over. So there is some time to learn about and plan for this new system. A couple of additional resources that might be useful:

• Announcement in Google blog
• A more in depth feature review in Search Engine Watch
• Google’s Enhance Campaign online resources