Google has introduced Enhanced Campaigns to its AdWords platform, with a view to bringing all advertising channels in line with one another.

With Enhanced Campaigns, the platform is combining mobile, tablet and desktop advertising into a single campaign spanning all devices. These campaigns will be customisable through bid adjustments, which can prioritise mobile as the advertiser wishes. Bids can be increased by up to 300 per cent for mobile, or decreased by up to 100 per cent to remove any mobile element. Advertisers can also bid up or down based on location or time, to target late-night shoppers or people looking for food within half a mile.

All of these adjustments can be combined, to prioritise nearby users looking for breakfast on their mobiles before 11am, for example, and ad creative can be optimised within a single campaign to automatically adjust to suit each device, or by location or time of day.

The roll-out also brings improved reporting functionality, enabling users to set customisable conversion goals – such as phone calls from a click-to-call ad, of 60 seconds or longer only.

Larry Kim, founder and CTO of internet marketing company WordStream, one of the companies that has been working with Google on the development of Enhanced Campaigns, thinks it represents the biggest change to the structure of AdWords campaigns in the past decade.

“Mobile search has been growing incredibly quickly – its actually expected to outpace desktop search by next year,” says Kim. “But Google has had a big problem monetizing that traffic. For one, setting up mobile campaigns has been much too complicated. The new campaign structure will greatly simplify targeting and bidding for different mobile devices and locations. Its a win-win for advertisers, Google, and its shareholders.

“There has always been a big gap between the CPC (Cost Per Click) on mobile versus desktop. For obvious reasons, Google wants to close that gap, and these changes will help it accomplish that. I believe that mobile CPCs will be similar to desktop CPCs by the time campaigns are auto-upgraded later this year.”

Enhanced Campaigns will be rolled out as an option over the next few weeks, starting immediately, and by mid-2013 it will be compulsory for all campaigns.

It seems that Enhanced Campaigns means separate mobile campaigns will no longer be an option on AdWords. Its not currently clear how it will work if advertisers dont want any desktop element to their campaign.