The company notes that while CPCs typically increase during the Spring, seasonality can be ruled out as the sole drive of this trend.

“With the introduction of Enhanced Campaigns the historically lower CPCs for tablet campaigns should increase to reflect desktop CPCs,” Adobe says in the report. “We’re only just beginning to see this trend materialize with a 3% increase in tablet CPCs with respect to desktop CPCs, along with a smaller 1% increase in mobile CPCs. These percentages will likely rise as advertisers holding off on migrating to Enhanced Campaigns until the July 22 deadline set by Google are forced to do so.”

“One other trend we noticed is that CPCs on Google have stabilized,” the report says. “For the past two years, Google CPCs fell on a year-over-year (YoY) basis due to the increase in mobile and tablet traffic where CPCs were lower. However, for the first time in 7 quarters the CPCs on Google are flat YoY and we anticipate that CPCs will rise on a YoY basis again starting next quarter. We expect this trend to positively impact Google’s ad revenue.”

Adobe says that with increasing CPCs, proper mobile bid adjustments (MBAs) are more critical. The company says Google’s tend not to reflect the performance of individual campaigns and a groups, and with that, Adobe announced it has updated its Media Optimizer algorithm to “ensure maximum ROI” for campaigns and “highly effective” MBAs.

“Search marketing is getting increasingly complex – and it is becoming increasingly difficult to use a manual approach to get the best possible performance from a relatively simple campaign,” the company says. “Not only are there GEO specific targeting options available, there are also device level and time-of-day/day-of-week options to consider. While MBAs are Google’s attempt to simplify this for marketers, this also complicates matters for the advertiser. Not only does one have to consider the bid but also the mobile adjustment factor to get the most out of a search campaign. This only increases the need for automated algorithmic bidding platforms that resolve the complexities to manage such programs.”

In the immediate future, enhanced campaigns will drive competitive pressure on tablets for this month and next month, Adobe notes, with the full effect of the change on the market coming in Q3.

Google’s Pavni Diwanjhi made the announcement in a Google+ post in which she said, “Today millions of businesses use Google+ to connect with their customers in meaningful ways. Many of these businesses also use AdWords to promote their products; Maps to update store info; and YouTube to publish high-quality video content (to name a few). We want to make it easier to manage your online presence – all across Google – so today we’re getting started with Google+ Dashboard.”

When you sign in to your Google+ Page, you can update your info like website URLs, store hours, phone numbers, etc. across all of Google from a single “Overview” tab.

You can also monitor your Google+ notifications, assign page managers, share photos and videos and start hangouts with followers right from the dashboard.

Local businesses can use the dashboard to access AdWords Express and Offers Campaigns, as well as insights like top searches for their business, top locations requesting driving directions and performance data for Google+ posts.

Google will soon be adding further functionalities.

When you log in to Google+ as your Page, you should see the dashboard icon in the navigation menu.

“The Auction insights report gives you valuable insight into how your ad performance compares with that of other advertisers,” says AdWords product manager Dan Friedman. “For example, based on the impressions you’re eligible for, you can see how often your competitors’ ads are appearing above yours or whether one of your competitors has a higher impression share than you on an important keyword. Before today, you could only get this data one keyword at a time – making it hard to see the bigger picture of where you stand relative to your top competitors.”

For groups of keywords, just filter your keyword list, select the ones you want to include, and run the report.

“You’ve probably already arranged your keywords into meaningful groupings within ad groups,” says Friedman. “For example, if you sell men’s wear, you may have an ad group for ‘Father’s Day gifts’ with keywords all about Father’s Day. Now, from the ad groups tab, you can select one or more ad groups to run an Auction insights report. This will show you how your performance on all eligible keywords within those ad groups compares to advertisers who most commonly compete with you on those terms.”

In scenarios where you want to run the report for individual or multiple campaigns, select the campaigns from the campaigns tab and so so.

“An item of note is that today, bid adjustments are ignored when importing campaigns from Google AdWords,” says Bing Ads program manager Dare Obasanjo. “The key reason for this is that there is a significant discrepancy between how bid adjustments are supported in Google AdWords and how they are supported in Bing Ads. As part of our upcoming changes, we plan to support the importation of bid adjustments from Google AdWords.”

This year, Microsoft says it will begin supporting the ability to specify a negative bid adjustment for various criteria, and will add support for adding bid adjustments for device targets.

“This means as an advertiser you can either increase or decrease your bid if the searcher is on a desktop/laptop, tablet or smartphone,” explains Obasanjo. “Given the different conversion rates one sees on mobile devices versus desktops and laptops, we believe providing this option will give advertisers a powerful tool to maximize their return on investment.”

To allow these changes, Microsoft has to update its range of supported bid adjustments, so device bid adjustments will range from -90% to +300%, while all other bid adjustments will range from -90% to +900%.

Finally, Microsoft will be adjusting bid adjustments so they’re combined as multiplicative percentages, as opposed to being added together.

“Today when a target user matches against multiple bid adjustment in Bing Ads these adjustments are added together,” explains Obasanjo. “We’ve received some feedback that the practice of adding together bid adjustments doesn’t align with industry practices or advertiser expectations in this space. This becomes especially problematic as we plan introduce negative bid adjustments to the system.”

Changes will begin to roll out at the end of the month, and should be generally available by the the end of the third quarter of the year.

The extensions are currently in beta, and join Google’s growing list of extension options.

“As the web evolves, Google users expect richer and more diverse content,” says Awaneesh Verma, Product Manager, Ad Formats. “More than one in six searches on Google today provide results with visual content. Image extensions will show in some cases when we determine that a search is likely for visual content. For example, it is more likely that your image extensions will show for a query like luxury car designs than locations of nearby car dealerships.”

“You can choose the images that you want displayed with your search ads and send them to us for review,” Verma says. “You must have the necessary rights to the the images you wish to display with your ads. We encourage you to submit your images as we continue to experiment with and improve our visual ad formats.”

For the time being, the new extensions are only available in English, but are available globally. You must fill out a form to apply to take part in the beta, however.

“Imagine you download a report from the Ads tab and want to test different creatives in ad groups that are underperforming,” writes AdWords Product Manager Prashant Baheti. “You might also want to turn off certain ad groups, or change the budget for others. Instead of toggling back and forth between AdWords and your spreadsheets, you can now download reports from the Ads and Ad Groups tabs, make changes directly in your spreadsheet, and upload them directly to your account.”

“Uploading changes to your ads and ad groups is simple,” adds Baheti. “Just like with keywords, when you download a report you will be prompted to make the report ‘editable.’”

After making changes, you can save in CSV, TSV and Excel formats. To upload ,click Reports and Uploads on the left side, and then select Uploads. From there, you will see the Upload Type column. You can only upload one report type at a time. If you want to make bulk changes to both keywords and ad creatives, this must be done separately.

Once you bulk upload, there’s no way to cancel the automatically reverse the changes. Something to keep in mind.

“Behind every successful AdWords campaign are well planned out keywords and ad groups,” says AdWords product manager Deepti Bhatnagar. “In the past, you may have relied on tools like the Keyword Tool and Traffic Estimator to identify new keywords and ad groups, get traffic estimates, and choose competitive bids and budgets. Over time however, we’ve heard from you that having two tools for search campaign building was cumbersome.”

“We’re constantly working to simplify the process of building campaigns, and today we’re happy to announce the launch of a new tool, Keyword Planner, which combines the functionality of the Keyword Tool and Traffic Estimator into a smooth, integrated workflow,” says Bhatnagar. “You can use Keyword Planner to find new keyword and ad group ideas, get performance estimates for them to find the bid and budget that are right for you, and then add them to your campaigns.”

The tool also comes with some new features, including the ability to find new keyword and ad group ideas by “multiplying” keywords (combining two or more lists to generate new keywords. It will now let you target individual cities and regions within a country.

It also lets you add keyword and group ideas to a “plan,” which Google describes as a shopping cart of ideas that you can add to a current or new campaign.

For more on plans and on the tool in general, read this.

The Keyword Tool and Traffic Estimator will be sunsetting in about sixty days.

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.