Enhanced Campaigns helps Google search advertising grow

Advertisers are increasingly turning to more sophisticated paid search methods through mobile, with Google’s ad solutions profiting nicely as a result.

According to data from Adobe, Google’s new Enhanced Campaigns feature, which groups desktop and tablet ad bids together while distinguishing them from smartphone and other mobile traffic has helped overall search spend to grow by 9% in the US compared with 2013, while UK spend has grown 10% since last year.  

Mobile has continued to eat away at desktop paid search, with 30% of overall spend. Adobe’s data trends indicate that the share for desktops will continue to decline and hit 60% of paid search by the end of 2014.

Personalisation is becoming a big theme in paid search, and Adobe’s director of business analytics, Sid Shah states current trends suggest a complete shift away from the traditional keywords-based search advertising to a more sophisticated method:    

“As we move from a world of key­words to audi­ences when it comes to paid search adver­tis­ing, it’s clear that dif­fer­ent peo­ple behave dif­fer­ently across devices, geo­gra­phies, time of day, and ver­ti­cal mar­ket,” Shah states.

“Adver­tis­ers are intent on reach­ing the right peo­ple at the right time with the right mes­sage at the opti­mum bid price to drive ROI/revenue. We expect to see a sec­u­lar shift from key­words to audi­ences in the future where adver­tis­ers will be able to tar­get audi­ences with per­son­al­ized mes­sages, with levers extend­ing beyond key­words as a mea­sure of intent.

“Google Enhanced cam­paigns rep­re­sent the first in these series of shifts where we have moved from key­word and match types to devices, time of day and geo­graph­i­cal levers. Mar­keters should expect more shifts and an even­tual audience-based buy­ing of search ads.

Adobe expects a number of additional search advertising changes to come into play by the end of 2014, including:

· Paid search spend to increase by 10–12% year-on-year for the rest of the year.

· Mobile and tablets to account for 35% of paid search spend by the end of the year.

· Bing and Yahoo to wrestle back some market share from Google, as budgets lean less in favour of Google

· A transition from product listing ads (PLA)s to Google Shopping campaigns to revive the growth of PLA spend

Google recently announced a number of updates to its Shopping platform to make targeted advertising campaigns easier. According to the tech giants, 85% of retailers on the platform are already using the new tools, further bolstering ad spend.