The right bid adjustments for your Google Ads bid strategy
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Google Ads bid adjustments are a crucial part of any PPC strategy. But, perhaps your ads aren’t driving the results you were hoping for at all, and your costs are still higher than you’d wish them to be. You could have optimised your ad copy, your landing pages, and even your keyword match types, but there’s still room for improvement. So, what’s next?
If you’re looking for a way to enhance performance without impacting your costs, bid adjustments within your Google Ads campaigns could be an effective weapon in your arsenal. After all, bid adjustments can help you to gain greater control over your ad spend, for more successful campaign optimisation. Not only that, but it can help you to maximise your return on investment, providing you make data-led decisions about your account.
In this blog, we’ll talk you through the different types of bid adjustments, how they can be used effectively, and in which scenarios you should look to use them.
What Are Google Ads bid adjustments?
A bid adjustment within Google Ads is a feature that allows users to increase or decrease their brands, based on certain criteria. Essentially, these adjustments enable you to display your ads more or less frequently based on when, how, and where someone is searching via the search engine. As an example, if someone is searching from a specific location, you may use a bid strategy to instruct Google that it can bid more, and therefore that click is then worth more.
Bid adjustments can be set based on various factors including device type, location, audience type, demographics, time of day, and past website visitors. It’s an effective way to maximise the potential of campaigns, especially if you focus on certain areas that have higher conversion rates.
Within this strategy, bid modifiers are also useful in allowing users to adjust bids based on certain criteria, but without changing the targeting of the campaign or ad group. If you want to focus on certain locations or times where ads perform better than others, this is particularly useful.
Ultimately, for those wanting to maximise the performance of their campaigns, bid adjustments offer flexibility for targeting and optimisation. Not only that but they can improve ROI (by adjusting bids based on how ads perform), they can help to increase click-through rates by showing ads more often to those more likely to click on them, and they can help you target specific audiences.
Types of bid adjustments you can make in Google Ads
Device adjustments
When it comes to adjusting bids based on a user’s device, you should increase the bids for devices where users are more likely to convert or even have a higher average order value. Decreasing your bids should happen on devices where users aren’t as likely to convert, or if they have a lower average order value. In a nutshell, prioritising devices that provide better ROI is the best way to utilise this type of bid strategy.
To make sure you’re getting the most out of your bidding here, it’s important to analyse your user behaviour and campaign data, ensuring you’re pushing and pulling spend in all the right areas.
Location adjustments
When adjusting bids based on location, you should consider a few things – conversion rates, customer value, search volume, and competition level. If specific locations generate high conversion rates or if customers tend to spend more, on average, in a particular place then it could be well worth increasing your bids, and of course decreasing them for the opposite scenarios.
As for search volume, it’s worth looking at search volumes for relevant search volumes per location. If keywords have higher search volumes in a particular location, it could indicate a larger customer base and it’s worth increasing your bids here.
In terms of competition – if it’s low in a certain area, you may well be able to capitalise on this by getting more impressions with a lower bid. If it’s high however, you might need to increase your bids to remain visible.
Ad scheduling
Ad scheduling and adjusting bids according to peak times is another efficient way to utilise your budget. You should increase bids during peak hours and days when conversion rates are higher, and decrease them during off-peak times when performance isn’t as strong. This means you’ll allocate more of your budget to the times that are likely most valuable.
Increasing bids can be done during high conversion times if your data shows that customers are more likely to convert at certain times of the day, on certain days of the week if they are consistently busier, and seasonal demand for when you experience those seasonal fluctuations.
Audience adjustments
The same pattern as we’ve discussed applies for audiences too – maximising your budget in this regard essentially means that, for those audiences there you’re confident they are highly likely to convert, it’s worth increasing your bids here. You can do this well by assessing which audiences have high engagement rates, as well as a high conversion rate. The same applies to the opposite scenario – look at who has low engagement and low conversion rates, and ensure your bids are lower here.
Similarly, if an audience isn’t relevant to your target market based on your campaign data analysis, you can increase bids here too. On the other hand, if you have a valuable customer segment where an audience aligns with your most valuable customer profile, it’s a good idea to prioritise them with high bids, thus maximising the potential revenue you can achieve.
Demographic adjustments
If you’re adjusting bids based on demographics, you could lean into the data that shows how specific age groups, genders or other demographic segments interact with your ads. That way, for those with higher engagement and conversion rates, you can increase bids here whilst decreasing the bids on those demographics that don’t tend to convert or interact with your ads.
Aside from considering the conversion rates of this group, you should also think about cost-effectiveness – that means analysing the cost-per-acquisition (CPA) for each demographic, to make sure that spending more on a certain group still remains profitable.
An example of a demographic bid adjustment would be bidding higher on 18-24 year olds if you’re a fashion brand and can see that this age group is most likely to purchase from you.
How to use bid adjustments effectively
Using your data
Within your bid strategy, you should be using your data to guide your decisions on how much to bid and where. By looking at conversion data, click-through rates (CTR), and return on ad spend (ROAS), you can effectively assess where to make necessary bid adjustments in Google.
As previously mentioned, you can increase bids for the areas with high conversion rate and higher average order values. The same thing goes for CTRs, but it’s also important to note for areas with low CTRs, your ad copy or targeting may need improving. As for ROAS, you can increase bids for areas with high ROAS, and decrease bids for those with a lower return. Monitoring ROAS can help you to determine how profitable different audiences and locations are.
Goal alignment
Ensuring that your bid adjustments are aligned with your campaign goals can help to ensure that you’re not only targeting the right audience, but that you’re concentrating your efforts and your budget in the areas that are most likely to help you in achieving your objectives. Whether you’re striving to increase brand awareness, drive more leads, or increase your sales, strategically altering your bids based on these goals ensure that you’re well on your way to optimising your overall Google Ads performance.
If you’re bidding based on your goals, it’s still important to set KPIs – for instance, if your goal is lead generation, then your KPI might be a specific cost-per-lead (CPL). You may also wish to use smart bidding where it’s relevant to do so. For campaigns with goals like lead generation and sales, Google’s automated bid strategies (like target ROAS) can work well in conjunction with a bid strategy. This is Google’s way of automatically adjusting bids in real-time, optimising for your goals.
And, it goes without saying, no matter what the aim of your campaign is, testing and optimising bid adjustments is vital – keep monitoring performance, and alter your bids based on real-time data and changes in your goals too. As an example, if you’re seeing a dip in revenue, you may wish to bid more aggressively on high-performing products or keywords to increase conversions.
Testing and optimisation
A/B testing with bid adjustments is a key part of the strategy. Only by continuously analysing data, testing, and refining your bid strategies will you give campaigns the best chance of running as efficiently and effectively as possible. Having such a data-driven approach will help you to improve ad performance, but just as importantly it will help you to remain agile in the face of changing market conditions and competition, ensuring that you are always getting the best use out of your budget.
A/B testing and continual optimisation can also help you to avoid over and under-adjustment, improve cost-efficiency and strive for continuous improvement. Better still, if you’re basing decisions purely on data, you can avoid any biased decision-making and instead, focus your efforts in areas based on real-time facts and data.
How to manage bid adjustments
Adding or removing a bid adjustment on the Search Network
- In your Google Ads account, select the Campaign icon. Then, click the Audiences, keywords, and content drop-down in the section menu. Select Locations, Ad schedule, Audiences, Content, Placements, Demographics or Advanced bid adjustments. To reach Devices, select the Insights and reports drop-down in the section menu. Click ‘When and where ads showed’.
- To set your bid adjustments for calls, audiences, or demographics, click Advanced big adj. Which will then open the Interactions page.
- To make the changes, select the row you want to adjust. Select the pencil icon under the ‘Bid adj.’ column. If you’re wanting to set bid adjustments for Devices, you also have the choice to select an ad group.
- Choose ‘Increase’ or ‘Decrease’ from the drop-down menu, and enter a percentage. To remove a bid adjustment, delete the value that’s in the field.
- Click Save.
Adding or removing a bid adjustment on the Display Network
- In your Google Ads account, select the Campaign icon. Then, click the Audiences, keywords, and content drop-down in the section menu
- To adjust your bids for specific demographic groups, select the desired group after clicking Demographics, and proceed from step 3. To adjust your bids for Placements, click ‘Manual’ and then continue from step 3.
- Click the campaign or ad group that you’d like to make adjustments to.
- Select the row that you’d like to change, then select the pencil icon under the ‘Bid adj.’ column. If you’d like to change multiple rows, select the boxes and then click the pencil icon.
- Choose ‘Increase’ or ‘Decrease’ from the drop-down menu, and enter a percentage. To remove a bid adjustment, delete the value that’s in the field.
- Click Save.
Still feeling like there’s a lot to consider?
As explored in this blog, there are a lot of elements that contribute to a successful Google Ads bid adjustment strategy. Whether it’s considering what factor to base your bid adjustments on (e.g. location, device, ad scheduling, etc.), analysing the data that underpins these decisions, or understanding how to actually make the changes within your Google Ads account, there can feel like a lot to consider.
We understand that for a lot of digital marketing teams, if you’re balancing the management of several channels, it can be difficult to give them all the TLC that they need, and that your business deserves. So, not only can our PPC team handle your PPC strategy with next-level expertise, but we can take it off your hands so you can concentrate your efforts elsewhere.
If you’d be interested in finding out more about bid adjustment strategy, or any other aspect of what makes a successful PPC strategy, then please get in touch with us.
