This day in search marketing history: February 6

Google AdWords announces Enhanced Campaigns

In 2013, Google AdWords announced Enhanced Campaigns. This major update was designed to simplify campaign management across multiple devices and increase adoption rates of mobile advertising among small and medium-sized businesses.

Among the notable changes:

• Tablets and desktops would be grouped together, rather than treated as separate devices.
• Advertisers would set a baseline bid that applied to both desktop and tablet, and then set the mobile bid as a multiplier of the desktop/tablet bid. 
• Targeting at the operating system level would no longer be available.

Google planned to upgrade all campaigns in June 2013 (though the full rollout would actually begin and would take several weeks to complete).

Read all about it in .

Also on this day

2020: Google introduced a refreshed version of its app for Android and iOS with some new features.

2020: Google kept finding more places to show Shopping ads as merchants prioritized them over text ads.

2019: Starting at the end of March 2019, Google would change how the Google Search Console Performance reports counted metrics.

2019: Google would display that information to searchers looking for more information about those times.

2018: The beta version had reached nearly everyone as of a couple of weeks ago.

2018: Less than a year after it launched, Google removed the shortcuts offering quick answers on weather, sports and entertainment info.

2018: Bing believed there were many questions where getting just one point of view was not sufficient, convenient or comprehensive

2018: Quora offered more options for behavioral and contextual targeting to either narrow or widen audience targets.

2017: The AMP header area would display a link or chain icon, what it called the “anchor” button. Clicking on this would make the publisher’s direct URL appear.

2017: Both advertisers opted to drive users to their own sites instead of YouTube.

2017: Swiping up from the bottom of the Google Maps app home screen on Android displayed a Places tab, Driving tab and Transit tab.

2015: Google said he latest update the SEO community noticed was not related to the Penguin or Panda algorithms.

2015: Google censored out the Google autocomplete results to show ISIS for the search term [how can I join].

2015: Changes were designed to make quality score easier to use as a guide to where to focus your optimization efforts.

2015: The spike in Gemini traffic appeared to come almost entirely at the expense of mobile ads served by Bing.

2014: He added that Google would be going after more Germany link schemes in the near future.

2014: Some business owners received emails from Google requiring them to reverify their listings within three weeks or their listings would be deleted from Google Maps and Google+ Local.

2014: Two new link tools were available for those looking to analyze their own links or competitor links.

2014: The logo included a quote stressing that the official Olympic Charter was against discrimination and using the colors of the rainbow gay pride flag.

2014: Yahoo inserted a Search Shortcut that displayed not only the live start time but the TV broadcast time at the top of the search results.

2013: Matt Cutts said the “writing is on the wall” for this feature. just over three years later, in March 2016.

2013: The Australian Competition & Consumer Commission sued Google six years earlier, claiming that certain travel-related ads appearing in search results were misleading.

2013: Despite reports that Naver controlled somewhere between 70-80% of the search market in South Korea, StatCounter was showing Google soundly defeating Naver since February 2012.

2013: Channel Intelligence offered a range of services built around data management and product feed optimization.

2013: Eighty percent of brands bought AdWords for branded searches and 50% bought AdWords for commercial taglines.

2013: The new feature overlayed lifts and trail maps for 38 major ski areas in the U.S.

2013: The Search, Discover and Connect tabs were all updated.

2012: If you went to the search preferences it would say Google Instant was only enabled when “my computer is fast enough” and then showed whether Google thought your computer was fast enough.

2012: Insufficient funding, a lack of education or just plain ignorance were the factors behind the flawed national-local approaches.

2012: The tool scanned for HTML Microdata, Microformats, RDFa, Schema.org and Open Graph.

2012: As an app search tool, it was quite nice. Neither Google nor Bing offered anything comparable in their main search engines.

2012: The law made online publishers potentially liable for the acts of individual users and third parties.

2010: His tweet suggested that Google would run its first major broadcast television commercial during the Super Bowl.

2009: Forrester Research had concluded that Google, for lack of user loyalty, was vulnerable to being dethroned and that another “Google killer” was lurking just around the corner.

2009: An example of overreaching in an effort to gain (media) attention.

2009: An interesting look into how Google tested its search results pages and how searchers interacted with them.

2009: The latest images showing what people eat at the search engine companies, how they play, who they meet, where they speak, what toys they have, and more.

2008: No real news other than Yang telling employees no decision had been made, proposals were being evaluated, and people loved Yahoo.

2008: Several internal groups were slated for leadership changes.

2008: 7% of Baidu’s traffic was to access free music, but Baidu had been a target of copyright actions because of this.

2008: It was similar to Google News, with a side of Digg.

2008: There wasn’t much map content about the tornadoes that tragically tore through the Southern U.S.

2008: Coverage of first SphinnCon event in Jerusalem, Israel.

2008: The company was hiring in its Nairobi, Kenya headquarters and opening new offices in several Africa countries.

2007: With the new ad ranking system in place, Yahoo hoped people would start looking at the results more as a whole.

2007: How marketers were using search volumes to help conduct research and development, launch new products and predict potential product success based on perceived consumer demand.

2007: They described the flatlining of the Google pen to cause “considerable inconvenience and loss of data.”

2007: IAC’s profits dropped 98 percent in the fourth-quarter.

2007: How Search Engine Land was growing.

Past contributions from Search Engine Land’s Subject Matter Experts (SMEs)

These columns are a snapshot in time and have not been updated since publishing, unless noted. Opinions expressed in these articles are those of the author and not necessarily Search Engine Land.

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