With the recent launch of Google AdWords Enhanced Campaigns, we’ve seen a lot of changes to how optimization operates within the platform.
Most notably, with Enhanced Campaigns, advertisers no longer have control over which campaigns and ad groups their ads are going to run in.
Instead, they can now bid for keywords across their entire account which makes the entire process of managing an account from a keyword level incredibly important.
The new “Signal” label is going to be another layer of optimization and it will be appearing under the Demographics tab within your Google Ads accounts which shows you how your bid influences who sees your ads.
Google mentions that this Signal can fluctuate as certain factors, like device type, location or language settings influence what Google thinks people want to see. Without getting into too much detail about how exactly these signals work, I think educating yourself on Ad Rank (another component of campaign optimization) is going to become more important with the adoption of the Signal feature in order to optimize for reach effectively while also maintaining control over costs.
By utilizing ad rank , you are able to assign a value or “cost” for each keyword, ad group, and sometimes landing pages.
Essentially Ad Rank is calculated by taking into account the Quality Score and your associated bid amount that you have submitted. The output of this formula will lead to one of three possible outcomes:
The first two scenarios happen quite often, but when you have a high Quality Score and bid amount, Ad Rank can be calculated to a decimal place which can lead to very competitive results. If this is the case, even with the highest ad rank possible, your ad may not appear because other advertisers are spending significantly more than you on their ads which might bring them higher up in the auction.
This is also something to think about when you’re setting up your initial bids. As mentioned above, Google can take certain signals into account and assign a higher bid amount based on those factors. But if you’ve historically been running at the same bid for several months or years, then it could be time to optimize your bidding strategy by reviewing these “signals” in order to lower costs now that Enhanced Campaigns have taken over.
Personally I haven’t seen this feature appear in any accounts yet as Google has only started rolling it out with a small percentage of users, but I assume more people will start seeing it soon. The best part about the Signal feature is that you won’t have to do anything to start seeing this data, you just need to log in and check it out!
