Kyle Sulerud - October 24, 2019First of all, a BID ADJUSTMENT is where you can set a specific percentage (higher or lower) for a particular option within the Google Ads account, and your base bid is going to be adjusted by that amount.
For example:
Now instead of a $10.00 per click bid for someone on a mobile phone, you’re actually bidding $7.50 because you’ve decreased your base bid by 25%.
You can also increase bids. Do a +50% bid adjustment for people clicking from computers.
Now instead of a $10.00 per click bid, if someone’s on a computer, you would be bidding $15.00, as you’ve added 50% to the base bid.
There are many different places where we can adjust bids within a campaign.
You can also adjust bids based on the schedule. You can decrease or increase your bids:
- for certain days of the week
- certain times of the day
- very specific times of the week (example: Monday Evening)
You can also make bid adjustments based on location.
If you’re a business that’s really targeting a core area that is close to your location, but you also recognize that you could get customers from far places, you can target the far-off places with a negative bid adjustment, as you’ve figured out that that traffic is not worth as much as the people who are closest to your business location.
You can also adjust bids based on audiences.
If you’ve added certain audiences to a campaign, you can adjust your bid for particular audiences within the campaign.
You can also adjust bids based on demographics such as age, gender, and household income.
But I must say that Google doesn’t necessarily know what people’s incomes are. I’ve never really seen a correlation between income and actual purchases. Don’t think that you will be getting better results simply by bidding more for higher income. Age and gender have better correlation on the buying behavior, as Google has a pretty good idea on what people’s age and gender are. If you have a product or service that appeals more to a particular age group and gender, then it may be worthy to bid higher or lower for different ages, or even exclude certain age groups and gender.
Why should we use bid adjustments?
We want to get more of what’s working, and less of what isn’t working. If we’re seeing areas within the campaign that are working well, then it’s usually a good idea to adjust the bid higher. If we’re seeing things that are not working very well, then we could adjust bids lower.
What happens if we adjust things in a number of different areas? For example, in a situation where they are on a computer and we have a positive bid adjustment there, but they are in a location where we have a negative bid adjustment, and maybe they are in an audience where we have a positive bid adjustment?
If we are adjusting things for devices, schedules, location, and now someone meets the criteria for all of these different things? Each area you’ve made a bid on will then interact with each other. There is a complex formula which I’m not going to discuss in this blog.
Essentially, the bid adjustments all work together based on the total positive or negative bid adjustments you have made. If you have more positive bid adjustments for a particular user, that will be considered as a positive bid adjustment overall. The same thing goes for negative bid adjustments. If the bid adjustment values are about the same, they are going to cancel each other out. You won’t really see much difference for that click.
I will caution you about adding too many bid adjustments. If it gets to that point where I’m seeing lots of differences, it would be better to have separate campaigns for different variables.
For example: If computers are far out-performing mobile phones. it’s usually a good idea to set up a separate campaign for computers vs. mobile phones. Because then, all of the other bid adjustments that you’re doing may not have a significant effect in the results.
You can keep computers confined to one campaign, and then you have different bid adjustments within the computer campaign for other options (schedule, demographics, location). Then you have mobile phone traffic confined to a different campaign with a different set of bid adjustments for the variables.
What’s the Bottom Line?
If you have minor bid adjustments, go ahead and keep them all in one campaign. If you’re adjusting things by 25% or more, that’s when you should think about keeping them in different campaigns.