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At one time or another you may have set up a Google AdWords campaign to draw traffic to your product listings and online stores. No matter how small your company, if you've adopted a "set it and forget it" attitude, it's time to take a look at some changes coming to the program that will effect you.

With the new Enhanced Campaigns, Google will display your AdWords ads across all devices. Rather than restricting your ad campaign to desktop computer users, or mobile-only, Enhanced Campaigns display your ads to desktop, mobile and tablet users.

But you only have until July 22nd to update your account to Enhanced Campaigns and make the changes that best suit your ecommerce advertising strategy!

You'll have to make some decisions about which is more valuable, a mobile shopper or a desktop shopper, and actually quantify by how much. Reports have surfaced that as advertisers transition to Enhanced Campaigns, the cost per click has risen - another reason to pay attention to your AdWords campaigns.

How Enhanced Campaigns Work
Very few online sellers fully understand the new campaigns, according to ROI Revolution's Justin D'Angelo, because they simply don't have the time to learn the ins and outs of it.

To understand how Enhanced Campaigns work and why Google is changing AdWords, it's useful to read this example Google provided of how a retailer might use Enhanced Campaigns across multiple devices:

"Let's say you create a campaign to promote your women's clothing boutique in San Francisco and your online store. In a single campaign, you can create ads with headlines, messages, and landing pages that are tailored to customers searching on their mobile device for women's clothing stores in San Francisco. At the same time, you can create ads that will appeal to people who want to shop for women's clothes on their desktop or laptop computer or tablet device. Then, you can choose to show your mobile-optimized ads to customers when they're viewing them on a mobile device."

Google goes on to explain, "On mobile devices, your mobile-optimized text ad will be given preference over standard text ads. On desktop or laptop computers and tablets, your standard text ad will be given preference over mobile-optimized text ads."

Google explains how to migrate to Enhanced Campaigns, and the page features two videos that walk you through the process. "Enhanced campaigns let you easily manage complex targeting, bidding, and ads for different platforms like mobile and computers all within the same campaign," it explains.

In addition, "you can reduce the overall number of campaigns you need to create - you no longer need to create a separate campaign for each target device type or location."

Setting Mobile Bid Adjustments
When you migrate your campaigns, you must select a mobile bid adjustment. This tells Google whether to bid more or less competitively for searches that occur on mobile devices. Under "Mobile bid adjustment" on the edit pane, enter a value from -90% through +300%, inclusive. You can also enter -100% to opt out of mobile for the selected campaigns or ad groups.

More information is available in the Google help pages, but the above-referenced videos do a good job of explaining how to deal with Enhanced Campaigns.

How Much Time Will It Take to Set Up Enhanced Campaigns?
It might not take much time for small sellers with simple campaigns to migrate and set their bid modifiers. But many merchants could spend 18-20 hours per account, according to Shahira Motani of NetElixir. "The complication increases when campaigns need to be merged with only computer/tablet campaign with mobile only campaign," she said.

Both Motani and D'Angelo believe the percentage of online sellers who are ready for the transition is fairly low - anywhere from 25% to 50%. "Inadequate understanding about the enhanced campaigns coupled with lack of trained resources pose substantial impediments for the transition," Motani said.

Will Clicks Cost More?
A major concern voiced about Enhanced Campaigns is the potential for increases in CPC (cost per click), according to Motani. In mid-June, Adobe reported a jump in Google CPCs that it believed was due in part to advertisers migrating to Enhanced Campaigns.

CPC inflation is a valid concern, according to Motani, and she recommends AdWords advertisers closely monitor their CPCs throughout the next few months. "However, the primary thing to keep in mind is that Google Adwords is an auction-based system. Enhanced Campaigns do not fundamentally change how the auction works, or how quality score functions."

How Does This Impact Your Bing Ads Campaign?
Upon hearing of the changes coming to Google AdWords, Microsoft's Bing Ads team said it did not believe that bundling together mobile, desktop and tablet advertising "in an opaque manner" was in the best interest of its customer base or the industry at large.

However, "Given our strong belief in the portability of advertiser data which was recently reinforced by Google's settlement with the FTC, we will be updating our product to ensure advertisers can continue to seamlessly transition between both products."

In fact, Bing recently recognized it was not the leader in paid search and wrote, "Bing Ads has a minority share of the search advertising market; advertisers are spending more time optimizing their campaigns with other search platforms. The Bing Ads team recognizes this and has a plan to better align our tools with your muscle memory."

Don't Procrastinate
The changes are coming on July 22, but don't be fooled into thinking you don't have to make any changes to your account if Google migrates your campaigns for you. "When the upgrade occurs, campaigns in the account will be merged, so it will take some manual changes to ensure that campaigns targeting various devices are optimized to run efficiently," Motani said.

At the very least, D'Angelo recommends merchants set a mobile bid modifier. "Google typically recommends a -20% drop, but I'd recommend a -50% mobile bid modifier and adjust it from there based on your own data," he said.

Ready or not, Google is moving all AdWords accounts to its new "enhanced campaigns" on July 22, 2013. It's better to be ready so at least you'll know what's coming!

Edited 7/8/13.

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About the author:

Ina Steiner is co-founder and Editor of EcommerceBytes and has been reporting on ecommerce since 1999. She's a widely cited authority on marketplace selling and is author of "Turn eBay Data Into Dollars" (McGraw-Hill 2006). Her blog was featured in the book, "Blogging Heroes" (Wiley 2008). Follow her on Twitter at @ecommercebytes and send news tips to ina@ecommercebytes.com.

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