These particular webinars deal with Google+ and Enhanced Campaigns and campaign management and strategies for upgrading. They combine for about 90 minutes of information.

Earlier this week, Google revealed that about two million AdWords campaigns have been set to enhanced, up from 1.5 last month, when Google held its Q1 earnings call.

If you haven’t made the transition yet, you might want to check out this tutorial on the Enhanced Campaigns Upgrade Center.

All campaigns will be upgraded automatically on July 22nd.

Today, Google released a tutorial for how to use the Upgrade Center ahead of the transition date.

“In order to take advantage of the powerful bidding tools, smarter ads, and advanced reporting that come with enhanced campaigns, you need to start by upgrading your campaigns,” Google says.

The video discusses how to use the tool to upgrade and merge legacy campaigns.

Google has uploaded a new webinar specifically on optimizing mobile strategy:

This week, Google launched the Enhanced Campaigns upgrade center, which provides a tool to help you transition to the new campaigns ahead of the date (July 22) when all campaigns will be upgraded automatically.

Google also added social annotations and availability for mobile app advertisers.

In a blog post, Google explains how to use the tool:

There are two basic ways to use the upgrade center.

1. Bulk upgrade

If you have search-only or search+display campaigns that have similar keywords and location targets, the upgrade center automatically identifies them as candidates to merge. You’ll then be able to preview and adjust the proposed campaign settings, ad groups, and extensions for the merged campaign. By default, ad groups and budgets will be combined. Other campaign level settings and extensions in the Primary campaign will override those in the Secondary campaign.

The upgrade center will be rolling out over the coming weeks. It can be found in the left-hand navigation bar on the Campaigns tab.

All campaigns will be upgraded to Enhanced Campaigns on July 22.

Google announced enhanced campaigns earlier this year as the next evolutionary phase of AdWords. The move, which was designed to provide advertisers with the ability to manage bids across devices from a single campaign, has been a controversial one with some advertisers embracing it and others decrying it. Bing has even tried to capitalize on the controversy, telling advertisers it won’t implement the same strategy.

According to Google, over 1.5 million campaigns have already been upgraded to enhanced campaigns.

The new social annotations tie into Google+. “Starting today, enhanced campaigns will include social annotations when they can improve ad performance, without additional edits to campaign settings,” explains Christian Oestlien, Director of Product Management for the Google Display Network. All you need is a Google+ page with a significant number of followers and a linked website that matches the URL in your search ads.”

Discussing enhanced campaigns for mobile app advertisers, Oestlien says, “Apps have become a significant part of people’s everyday mobile experiences. In fact, US consumers spend an average of 127 minutes per day using mobile apps. Advertisers can now reach app users, with ads in apps, based on people’s context like location, time of day and device, with enhanced campaigns. For example, if a certain mobile app has the most usage on Saturday evenings, you can increase your bid adjustments for mobile and this time of day to reach these users. You can also adjust bids across the key display signals like demographics, interests, topics and remarketing at the ad group level. All of these powerful bidding tools will enable you to reach the right people with the right ads.”

Google has regularly been hosting webinars discussing how to get the most out of enhanced campaigns. Another one will take place on Tuesday.

So if you haven’t gotten your feet wet yet, you may want to pay attention to the webinars on Enhanced Campaigns that Google has been providing. We recently shared one that focused on Google Shopping and Enhanced Campaigns. A new one that Google has provided deals with Enhanced Campaigns on the Google Display Network:

This week, Google announced ad group mobile bid adjustments for Enhanced Campaigns.

“We think this may be useful if you’ve been operating large scale campaigns and found that your optimal bids for some keywords would require significantly different mobile bid adjustments within an enhanced campaign,” says Group Product Manager Bhanu Narasimhan.

“Example: A nationwide retail chain currently uses mobile-only campaigns to optimize bids for several hundred thousand keywords,” Narasimhan continues. “They’ve found that 95% of their keywords in mobile-only campaigns have bids that are 10% lower than in the equivalent desktop campaigns. The remaining 5% of their keywords have very different bid ratios (ranging from 40% lower to 100% higher) based on differences in performance and competition on mobile and desktop. By using the new ad group bid adjustments for mobile, this retailer can better maintain their desired bids and ROI on different devices as they upgrade to enhanced campaigns.”

Google says most advertisers will see the most value in using the existing campaign level bid adjustments.

API access for the new feature will be available first, in early May.

Enhanced campaign upgrades will start happening automatically on July 22.

TheDrum.com reports (via Search Engine Land) that Google has pulled all Moneysupermarket ads as part of the crackdown, which is the result of increasing government pressure on Google.

The publication shares a statement from a Google spokeswoman, who said, “We have a set of policies which govern what ads we do and do not allow on Google. We have strict policies for those advertising short term loans, and make it very clear that advertisers need to comply with local regulations and be transparent about their fees, implications of non-payment and collection practices. If we discover sites that are breaking this policy we will take appropriate action.”

Here’s what Google says about short-term loans in its AdWords policies:

Short-term loans are defined as secured or non-secured loans with a duration of 60 days or less. Google doesn’t allow websites for short-term loans that don’t include all of the information below (includes lenders, lead generators, and aggregators of short-term loans):

• Legitimate contact information or physical address (P.O. box addresses are not acceptable)
• Compliance with other state or local regulations related to short-term loans
• Prominent disclosure of the following on the landing page, meaning that it’s shown in the same font type, size, and color as the base text on the landing page and presented in a way that is clear and conspicuous to users:
  • APR
  • Implications of non-payment, including the following:
    • Financial implications (whether fees are charged and/or interest rates are raised)
    • Collection practices
    • Potential impact to users’ credit score
    • Renewal policy information, including if the renewal is automatic and if there are fees associated with the renewal

    Aggregators/lead generators may provide sample implications from their network to satisfy the above requirements. Implications of non-payment should be grouped together in one location on the landing page.

Google has different policies for Japan, Singapore, the UK and the US. These can all be found here.

Advertisers who have had their accounts suspended are advised to review the guidelines, remove all unacceptable content from ad text and their websites, provide users with accurate info about business, products and services, ensure that their sites contain all info required by state and local lawas, and be transparent about the products or services being promoted.

“These features will help you achieve your conversion and ROI goals, and make the upgrade to enhanced campaigns easier by directing users to a device-specific landing page at the keyword level [and aligning performance reporting with device groupings used in enhanced campaigns," says AdWords senior product manager Karen Yao.

Specifically, Google has added the {ifnotmobile:[value]} parameter, which lets you replace [value] with the text that will show up in your URL when the user clicks the ad from a computer or tablet. They’re changing the parameter {ifmobile:[value]}, which will now insert the specified value into the URL only when the user clicks from a mobile device.

Google shares some examples for using these parameters in a blog post here.

If you still need to learn more about upgrading to Enhanced Campaigns, Google has a guide available here.

“While we will not prevent the use of trademarks as keywords in the affected regions, trademark owners will still be able to complain about the use of their trademark in ad text,” Google says, adding, “Google’s goal is to provide our users with the most relevant information, whether from search results or advertisements, and we believe users benefit from having more choice. Our policy aims to balance the interests of users, advertisers and trademark owners, so we will continue to investigate trademark complaints concerning use of trademarks in ad text. In addition, this change means that the AdWords policy on trademarks as keywords is now harmonised throughout the world. A consistent policy and user experience worldwide benefits users, advertisers and trademark owners alike.”

Google won’t prevent advertisers from selecting a third party’s trademark as a keyword in ads targeting the specified regions. The policy change does not impact the usage of trademarks in ad text. Google will continue to restrict use of trademarks in ad text for those in the affected regions that have already filed existing complaints about keywords and ad text.

Keywords that were restricted as a result of a trademark investigation may start triggering ads in the affected regions. If you don’t want this to happen, you can remove the keywords from the campaigns or add them as negative keywords.

You can read the FAQ here.

The changes bring Google’s policy in the affected regions in line with its policy in the rest of the world.

Hat tip to Ginny Marvin