Adwords Bids Based on Device, Time and Location
You must have read my previous blog – Improve Campaign Performance with Strategic Segmentation. Now, if you segment the data. You observe, that there are certain hours of day or days of the week, devices, and locations, which are either performing exceptionally well or are destroying your budget.
The beauty of AdWords is that you can create a deep strategy and apply it in your campaigns to reap better results without losing traffic and new customer. Bid Modifier is one of the great tools to manage the marketing dollars and helps to achieve a good return on investment.
What is Bid adjustment: – In an AdWords campaign, advertisers can set the bids at keywords/Adgroup level but at the same time advertisers can increase or decrease their bid by percentage for locations, mobile devices and day or hours a day in the campaign/ad groups depending upon their ad performance. Using Bid Adjustments, an advertiser gains more control over when and where the ad is shown and gets help to improve the return on investment (ROI).
The basic Mathematics of setting bid adjustments: – If you have noticed that 16:00 Hrs. to 18 Hrs. are peak business hours for you, where you get a lot of enquiry/sales, you decide that you want to increase the Bid by 35%.
So what is your actual max CPC during that period?
Let’s assume your keyword’s maximum CPC is $5 and you increased the Bid by 35%, then
Starting bid: $5
Ad Scheduling Bid adjustment: $5 x (+35%) = $1.75
Resulting bid for searches on that hours: $6.75
Bid Adjustment Calculator:-
When you have applied bid adjustments at different levels, it is important to remember that multiple adjustments can apply to your ads.
e.g. A campaign with a schedule that changes your bids by -25% on Tuesday, +50% for your one location Delhi, and +300% for mobile devices.
Thus final bid on Tuesday for the mobile device on Delhi Location would be 4.5X (assuming X is the max CPC of a keyword.)
But what happens, if you are not an expert in the quick calculation, don’t worry, luckily AdWords is integrated with a tool for Active Bid Adjustment at the campaign level to calculate the final bid adjustment which means the impact of multiple adjustments.
Once you click on the highlighted box, a pop box will open and you can see the actual impact of your campaign:-
Bid Adjustment Ranges:-
* You can set -100% to opt-out of Mobile Device Targeting.
* You can’t exclude tablets and computers from campaign targeting
* For call-only ads on mobile devices, this +300% cap does not apply
** If you are using automatic bidding, it’s not possible to set bid adjustments for ad scheduling.
Note: – Only a 100% decrease for mobile devices can be used with Conversion Optimizer.
Strategies for applying Bid Adjustment: – If you are planning to apply bid adjustment in your campaign, you must consider the following point –
For Device Bid Adjustment –
- If you are seeing you are getting more conversion from a mobile device, you may increase the Bid on mobile devices.
- If you don’t have a mobile-friendly website, you may decrease bids on mobile devices.
- If your objective is to target only Mobile audiences, you can set a lower bid for keywords and increase bids up to 300%.
For Location Bid Adjustment –
- If you see that certain locations are yielding the greatest number of conversions, then you can increase the bid for that particular location.
- If your business serves local customers, thus in order to target customers close to your business more aggressively, set different bids for that location.
- Apply device and location bid adjustment to reach more people on mobile in the area, which is in close proximity to your physical store.
For Ad Scheduling Bid Adjustment –
- Identify the peak business hours and increase Ad scheduling bid adjustment to gain opportunity.
- Decrease the bid up to -100% for non-business hours, e.g. after before 9 AM and after 6 PM or at weekends.
Closing Summary: – Most advertisers are using ad scheduling depending on the campaign’s objective and return on investment. Are you utilizing a powerful Bid adjustment feature to improve campaign performance? What are your strategies? Let us know in the below comment box.
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About Rakesh Kumar
I have been working on Google Adwords & Bing Ad Center since April 2010. I am Google Adwords Certified in Fundamental and Advance. I have worked on International and Domestic (Indian) campaigns for clients. I have also done extensive in-house campaigns within my organization. I have worked across various verticals and industries.
