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A few months ago Google announced Enhanced Campaigns. One of the major changes this brings is that segmenting Search Network campaigns by device is impossible. Tablet is now lumped together with desktop. Bids for mobile can be altered (as a campaign level bid adjustment), and you can turn off mobile advertising all together, but you can’t turn off desktop targeting to have a mobile-only campaign.

Your options are campaigns that target desktop and tablets, or campaigns that target desktop, tablet and mobile (with adjusted bids). This means that if you had different versions of campaigns for different devices, when you upgrade you can only keep one active. But if you’ve had separate campaigns they are likely to have grown apart, even if they started as simple duplicates.

So, let’s say you’ve decided to keep the desktop campaign but you have tablet and mobile campaigns you want to merge into it. You need to check for differences, then judge whether anything that was only in the mobile or tablet campaigns should be copied into the desktop campaign. But how?

From the title you may have guessed: I suggest using Excel.

AdWords has changed a bit over the years. The interface changes, functions come and go, new settings appear…

The problem is that not everything changes at the same time, meaning AdWords Help might not immediately reflect shiny new features. The AdWords exams – and the Exam Study Learning Center – are always behind on something.

It’s possible that some things are left out for simplicity. For example, it’s possible they left out some of the many and varied targeting methods for the Display network in the Fundamentals sections to avoid over-complicating things. But some things are just plain wrong.

If you use AdWords quite a lot but are just studying for the AdWords exams, it’s useful to know what the exam thinks is the case and what actually is the case. Or if you’re using the Learning Center to teach yourself about AdWords, you may be wondering why what you’re reading doesn’t match the real thing. Here’s a rough guide to where the Learning Center and exams are behind.

If you advertise on Search, you should already know how important it is to find negative keywords – they stop you wasting money by stopping your ads showing on irrelevant searches.

But if you’re on the Display Network, things are a bit trickier. You still want to avoid wasting money showing ads to people who aren’t interested (and you want to avoid unfortunate appearances), but negative keywords don’t work as well. For best results you’ll need to look at all of the negative targeting options.

• Placements

These are websites you exclude. If a placement is a domain, that stops your ad from showing anywhere on that domain (or its subdomains). You can also specify subdomains or subfolders, or even individual pages.

Unfortunately there isn’t an ‘exact match’ for placements, so you can’t block a site’s homepage while still showing ads on deeper pages.

• Topics

Topics let you exclude swathes of websites according to theme. Google’s categorisation isn’t perfect, but excluding a topic is more powerful than just excluding a keyword or individual site.

To get an idea of what websites are in a Topic, use the Placement Tool.

• Categories

They aren’t available for positive targeting, but if you scroll down to the Exclusions section of the Display Network tab you’ll see ‘Categories’. If you want to stop your ads appearing on sexually suggestive content or pages about death and tragedy, go here. You can also see how you perform when your ads appear in videos, or on pages with videos, or in games. There are also particular types of website, like forums and parked domains.

So now you know the negative targeting options, how do you work out how to use them? What placements, topics and categories do you exclude?