If you are not a PPCer by trade, the news of enhanced campaigns within Google’s AdWords platform probably meant very little to you. You may have been alerted to a few simple changes to your account, but nothing seemed to be too outlandish…unless of course you ARE a PPC enthusiast, in which case you were OUTRAGED.

Information has been swirling - some great, some not so great - about all the impending changes to Google AdWords, and how Enhanced Campaigns are going to revolutionize paid search advertising. The public is still skeptical, and many are downright upset about how Google is taking the control out of the hands of the most experienced AdWords professionals in order to focus on making more money from the smaller players. All this has yet to play out and we will have to wait and see where it takes us, but what has hardly been mentioned thus far is how Enhanced Campaigns will impact display advertising via the Google Display Network.

Conversion tracking is a key component in running effective and efficient Paid Search marketing. It should be a primary focus for both the marketer and the business being marketed. Below are three critical steps for getting the most out of your Paid Search efforts.

As you may have heard, Facebook recently unveiled a new way for businesses to reach the people they care about most – their current customers. Facebook Custom Audiences (aptly named) allows advertisers to match customer e-mail lists and phone numbers with Facebook’s vast user database. Once matched, ads can be created around these highly targeted segments and displayed exclusively to those Facebook users.

Using only one device in the purchasing cycle is a thing of the past. Instead, consumers are turning to whichever device is most convenient at the moment, considering time, location, Wi-Fi accessibility, etc. Like many others, I can attest to this through my own personal experience. As a consumer, I am using my desktop while at work, scrolling through my mobile during lunch, and surfing the web on my tablet while I relax at home - all the while moving seamlessly across all devices. So why shouldn’t advertising reflect that behavior?

Thanks to smarter messaging and bidding, Enhanced Campaigns change how marketers target users searching across devices. The new format integrates Desktop/Tablet and Mobile bidding into one streamlined campaign, while adding advanced reporting as well as new features to sitelink and call extensions.

The world of display advertising can be a confusing place, as there are a number of ways to buy ads and an even greater number of ways in which you can target them. The days of buying ads to run on specific sites, or even placements within sites, are long gone with today’s shift toward focusing on audience buying. This has been proven to be a much more effective and cost-efficient way for advertisers to achieve their display advertising goals.

Knowing and understanding metrics is one of the most important aspects of running a Paid Search account. Creating campaigns with excellent results is paramount to an account’s success, but knowing what those results mean and how to make decisions based on them is equally important.

The days of Google’s 10 simple blue links in search results are far behind us.

I am here to put the negative connotations of cookies to rest. As many of us can admit, at one point in time we were a part of the masses that believed cookies were used as an intrusive monitoring tool. Thanks to infamous Facebook conspiracists, public opinion of cookies has gone so far to suggest they were another way for the government to keep track of its children.  As Adweek has stated, “yes, it’s Big Brother time… But now, rather than spying on you, he’s become your BFF” (Mars, 2012). You mean cookies are trying to guide us?