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When it comes to adjusting bids within our Pay Per Click (PPC) campaigns, we typically prefer to use the manual bidding option to control bidding. There are also auto options that Google allows us to set up to allow Google to auto adjust bids for you as they see fit to your settings. Although this can be very helpful when it comes to time management, it can also work against you when it comes to target ROI’s and other metrics. There are a few bid adjustments however that can work great to assist in giving a significant boost in Sale and/or leads. But make sure you have a great understanding of what each of these bid adjustments do, as they can quickly work against each other in the process, which can all but negate the adjustment you put into place.
Device Bid Adjustment
The first bid adjustment we will talk about is the Device bid adjustment. Within your Google Adwords account in each of the campaign settings, Google gives us the option to make an increase or a decrease on the Mobile device traffic. This can be very beneficial if you have a product or service that is commonly searched on Google on mobile devices. In the Device settings of your Google Adwords campaign, you have the option of putting up to +300% bid increase on top of your current Adgroup or keyword bids. As an example, if your keyword bid was $10.00 and you had a mobile bid adjustment setting of +100%, with this setting your bid will now be increased by Google automatically to $20.00.
In contrast to that bid increase, you also have to ability to make a decrease mobile bid adjustment of as much as -100%. The mobile decrease bid can come in great use if your website does not get a lot of mobile traffic, or if your site is a bit older and is not up to par with being mobile friendly. So for another example, if you have a keyword bid of $10.00 and you have a mobile bid adjustment of -50%, with this setting your bid will now be decreased by Google automatically to $5.00. This would virtually mean that your mobile traffic would only cost 50% of what your Desktop or Tablet traffic would cost you. This can save a lot of money if mobile costs were taking up the majority of your budget while only converting 50% less than traditional desktop or tablet traffic.
GEO Location Bid Adjustments
Next we’ll talk about GEO Location bid adjustments. Let’s say that you have a campaign currently running where you are targeting the whole United States of America as your main geo target location. Your campaign does well at times, but there are some times that it does not do so well no matter how much you optimize your bids on the keywords. With geo location targeting we can now look to make bid increases on the geographic areas where we get the most sales or leads, or decreases on geo locations where we get the lease or more costly sales or leads.
Within the campaign settings you’ll find the Location settings. Once you open this setting up and search and find a geo location that you would like to make a bid adjustment on, you have the option of making up to +900% bid increases, or as much as -100% in decrease bidding. So for example, you get the most sales or leads from Norfolk, Virginia, by increasing your bids for anytime your ad shows in this geographic location, you ensure yourself a better ad position and possibly more sales or leads in return because you know that Norfolk, Virginia has proven to convert for you the most. And the same would apply of course if you found a geographic location that just doesn’t convert as often or converts for much more in cost than other locations. Just set a quick percentage decrease in your geo location settings, and you can minimize your costs for that location.
Ad Schedule Bid Adjustments
Finally we will take a look at Ad Schedule bid adjustments. This type of bid adjustment can be beneficial if through your analytic data you find that certain times of the day produce more sales or leads for you versus other times of day. This also has the ability to be adjusted for certain days of the week (Sun-Mon) that you prefer the time of day adjustment to be on. For example, if you have an ad running from the hours of 8am – 6pm Monday – Friday, but you discover through some of your anlytics data research that most of your sales or leads come in between the hours of 10am – 1pm on Tuesdays. You have the capability to create an Ad Schedule in your campaign settings, and set up to a +900% increase between the hours of 10am – 1pm on Tuesdays. Or alternatively you can make as much as -100% decrease during hours on days that you find are costing you a bit too much per sale or lead.
These three bids can work wonders if you make the proper adjustments within your campaigns. So take your time to analyze key data before you make any automatic bid adjustment. Also keep in mind that these bid adjustments are their own adjustment, and can be affected by another bid adjustment at the same time. For example your keyword bid is $1.20, and you make a +20% Dallas, Texas geo location bid adjustment along with a -5% mobile bid adjustment, your end bid adjustment could end up being only+ 14% (1.14). So keep this in mind when you start to make multiple bid adjustments within the same campaign settings of your Adwords account.
– Bobby Pena, PPC Manager
