Managing your own Google Ads account for the first time can be challenging. You’re faced with an overwhelming interface of tables, charts and settings and knowing where to begin can be daunting to say the least. Your primary focus is going to be on organising your campaigns, ad groups and keywords and navigating the options of dynamic ad groups, smart campaigns and everything else Google will throw at you as you set up your account. One area that you can easily overlook is setting up bid adjustments. Bid adjustments are not something Google tells you much about when you’re setting up your campaign, but they can be extremely useful when you want to optimise your campaign for better performance.
What is a bid adjustment?
When you set up your Google Ads campaigns you have a few options when it comes to bids. You can choose an automated bidding strategy to optimise for clicks or optimise for conversions, for example, or you can choose to manually set your bids. Automated bidding strategies allow Google to place the bid on your behalf based on what it knows will get you the results you want. This takes some of the guess work out of how much you should bid on your keywords, but it also means you can easily lose control over how much you’re paying per click. A manual bidding strategy allows you to set bids for each and every keyword which gives you more control, but makes the management of your account a lot more time consuming.
Whichever bidding strategy you choose, you have the option to raise or reduce your bids when certain criteria are met. This means you can reduce the amount you spend on clicks you feel are worth less to your business (i.e. they’re less likely to convert into sales), and pay more for clicks from users you feel are worth more to your business.
Types of bid adjustments
Device
Google Ads breaks down traffic by device, showing users who click on your ads from desktop devices, mobiles and tablets. You can increase or decrease your bids based on the device your users are viewing your ads on.
Why would you want to do this? Isn’t all traffic worth the same? It depends on your business, but you are likely to find that traffic converts better on certain devices (most likely desktop). This won’t be the case for every business, but for many, users seem to favour a big screen when it comes to making purchases, particularly if it’s a purchase which takes a lot of thought and requires a lot of research. This doesn’t mean that mobile traffic won’t convert, but it often means the conversion rate is significantly lower. Mobile traffic is still important as you’ll find users may visit on a mobile whilst they’re researching your product or service, but you may want to reduce the amount you spend on mobile traffic and focus your budget on desktop traffic where users are ready to buy.
Word of warning! You need a decent amount of data from your campaigns (including conversion data), before you can really see which devices perform better for your ads and your audience. So this isn’t something to mess with from day one, unless you deliberately want to hide your ads from say mobile users because your site doesn’t function on a mobile device. (You can do this by decreasing your bid by 100%.)
Location
Location targeting comes with its own set of bid adjustments, providing you’re targeting more than one location. For example, you may be targeting the whole of the UK for your campaign, but want to focus your budget on key areas. Perhaps you sell a high-end product which commands a hefty price tag, your targeting could be focused on more affluent areas by including the counties, cities or postcodes you particularly want to target. You can then use bid adjustments to increase your bids on areas you want to focus on.
Or perhaps you run events and know that people will generally attend from the local area, but you still want to advertise further afield to reach a larger audience. You could set several locations based on different mile radiuses of your venue and adjust the bids to bid higher the closer the user is to your location.
Ad Schedule
Creating an ad schedule for your campaigns is a great way to control the days of the week and times of the day that your ads will show. You may want to do this if your ads are aimed at getting people to call you during office hours, for example. Or you may find that Sunday afternoons are a peak time for orders and want to capitalise on this and allocate more budget to Sundays. Bid adjustments allow you to do this, provided you have created an Ad Schedule for your campaigns.
We’d recommend blocking time in your ad schedule for this purpose. Depending on your product/service and your audience, your ad schedule may look a little different. For B2B products and services, you may have office hours as one time block, then evenings and weekends as separate time blocks. For B2C, you may have mornings, afternoons, evenings, weekends and late nights as separate blocks of time you can adjust bids for.
As with device bid adjustments, you’ll want to make sure you are increasing or decreasing your bids based on solid data from your campaigns. Whilst you might think people are likely to convert during the day, you may find they prove you wrong, so always base bid adjustments on known data, not your best guess.
All bid adjustments pose an opportunity to fine tune your campaigns, optimise your budget and help you to achieve better conversion rates and therefore a better return on your advertising spend. Don’t rush into tweaking your bids if your campaigns are relatively new. Instead, make sure you have a few months of data and plenty of conversion data in your account before deciding what’s working and what’s not.
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