How to Clone an AdWords Campaign to Target Mobile Users

As more and more consumers adopt mobile devices, it makes sense to look at mobile advertising as a viable way to get in front of potential consumers.

Fortunately, Google AdWords provides the capability to target different platforms for paid search advertising. In particular, Google allows you to separately target desktop and mobile visitors in paid advertising. This article will walk you through how to adapt a separate mobile campaign from an existing campaign set up in Google AdWords that currently lumps desktop and mobile platforms together.

In order to quickly clone the campaigns, you will need to first download and install Google AdWords Editor desktop tool. AdWords Editor is one of my favorite "power user" tools for managing larger or more complicated campaigns. The tool will allow you to make bulk changes, global find-and-replace, etc. For this effort, we will be concentrating on the copy-paste options that AdWords Editor brings to the table. We will be using AdWords Editor to do the heavy lifting.

The basic approach here is to clone an existing campaign, then customize the original and cloned campaigns to properly target the relevant audiences. Once the software has been installed and your account has been loaded into AdWords Editor, here are step-by-step instructions. We will need to make changes at the Campaign, AdGroup, and Ads level.

The following nine steps should be performed for each campaign that you want split into desktop and mobile versions.

1. Copy the campaign. Select the "Campaigns" tab in AdWords Editor. Highlight a specific campaign and copy with Ctrl-C (or Edit/Copy from the top navigation).

2. Paste the campaign. Use Ctrl-V to paste the campaign into the account to create a new campaign. This will generate an error since the new campaign has the same name as the original. Ignore the error message for now; we will fix this in Step 4.

3. Edit the Target Devices. Under the Campaigns Tab, Choose the "Edit" link in the Devices section (you may need to select "Let me choose..." first), then uncheck the "Mobile devices with full browsers." We have chosen to include "Tablets with full browsers" as a type of desktop, since the screen size is such that a desktop design should render properly on these devices.

Now it's time to clean up the new (cloned) campaign to make it distinct from the original campaign.

4. Rename the Cloned Campaign. I recommend you develop a way to differentiate mobile campaigns from desktop campaigns so at a quick glance you know whether a campaign is mobile or not. For example, at KeyRelevance we like to start mobile campaigns with an "X" prefix so that they all show up together in the campaign list, down towards the bottom. (For what it's worth, we also use "Z" for Display/Content Network Campaigns for the same reason.)

5. Edit the Targeted Devices List in the Cloned Campaign. This is done like in Step 3, above, except we are flipping which devices are and are not targeted. In this case, we will uncheck the Desktop and Tablets and select the "Mobile Devices with Full Browsers" option. No changes should be needed on the options on this page (unless you are specifically targeting Android or iPhone users).

The next two steps need to be performed for each AdGroup within the cloned campaign.

6. Rename the AdGroups (Optional). Again I like to have the AdGroup name reflect the Mobile focus as well, so I'll prefix an "X" onto the AdGroup name.

7. Set up Bidding. You may want (or need) to adjust bidding. If the original campaign was using Cost Per Action (CPA) bidding , the new campaign will still need to start with Cost Per Click (CPC) bidding. You will need to a) set a reasonable CPC bid, and b) set the CPA Bidding to "Auto." AdWords Editor will complain if you skip this step.

You may need to perform some additional cleanup at the Ads level in the campaign. For example, you may want to point visitors at a mobile-friendly landing page or use a "Call us" call to action rather than a long survey form. There may also be some obsolete ads from earlier experiments that got cloned from the original campaign.

8. Delete Paused Ads/Keywords. Earlier test ads. from the original campaign should be cleaned out of the cloned campaign. You may also want to do some housecleaning on your keyword list in the cloned campaign.

9. Retarget landing pages. We like to have a mobile-friendly landing page for mobile visitors, so we modify the Ad landing page Destination URLs to point to those new pages. Assuming a one-size-fits-all mobile site, you can edit one ad and trim/modify the URL to match the mobile home page, then copy the URL, select ALL ads in the cloned campaign, and paste the copied URL into the Destination URL field, replacing the "" designation. You may also need to clean up the Display URL.

Mobile device usage is expected to continue to grow at a dramatic rate. If you are not already targeting your advertising for mobile use, you may be missing a great opportunity. The steps described in this article will make setting up a mobile campaign easy. Many are calling mobile the new ecommerce platform. If you haven't tried mobile advertising yet, you could very likely be missing out on sales.

Christine Churchill is the President of KeyRelevance.com, a full service Dallas search engine marketing company that specializes in helping businesses succeed online. Christine and her experienced team of online marketers provide a holistic approach to marketing: increasing a site's visibility online, improving the user experience on the site, and maximizing the site's conversion potential.

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