If you haven`t heard, Google announced its Enhanced Campaigns for Adwords last week. Beginning in June, your search campaign will automatically be opted into mobile; in other words, you can opt out of mobile targeting in your search campaign however, you cannot (as we do at Media Experts daily) run a mobile only search campaign.

According to Google, “Enhanced Campaigns’ powerful set of tools promises to give advertisers the ability to easily manage ads across locations, time and devices – all within a single campaign.” The inherent probelms we see with this move include advertisers being forced to relinquish control over how they target users across different devices. Don’t be surprised when you end up paying more for every click. Advertisers will also relinquish the ability to target tablet users separately as that device will be amalgamated with desktops and laptops. This diminishes our ability to measure ROI across devices.

And then, following closely on the heels of that announcement, Morgan Stanley reported that Google could pay more than $1 billion in 2014 to remain the default search engine on iOS.

Coincidence? We don’t think so.

What Google is really up to is taking control away from agencies and advertisers, lumping search on mobile devices in with all other search in order to increase their revenues from mobile search campaigns.

See Romain Dillet’s article in Tech Crunch on the Google-Apple news here:

http://techcrunch.com/2013/02/12/google-to-pay-apple-1-billion-next-year-to-be-default-search-engine-on-ios/

What do YOU think? Leave us your comments below.