Bidding

Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

In display campaigns, you can set your bids in different ways. Whatever option you choose, it makes sense to optimize your bidding strategy.

Premium buys

With premium buys – for example, placements on reputable media outlets like the New York Times or the Guardian – you pay a fixed CPM. This is a set price for 1,000 impressions. The advertiser agrees to buy a number of impressions on a certain day in specific parts of the website. They can also be purchased on a CPV (Cost Per View) basis if you are purchasing video units. Or you could also take part in a run of site (or ROS) deal, where your impressions can be delivered in any area of the website. ROS deals are cheaper as they are less targeted.

The disadvantage of premium buys is that you can't really influence the cost. It's a formal deal where you agree to pay a set price rather than an auction model. The key to optimizing a premium buy is to ensure the visitors to the website are your ideal customers and the creative format is highly engaging. This ensures you gain most brand attention, impact, and awareness from your campaign.

Real-time bidding (RTB)

The other way to serve display ads is through an ad exchange using real-time bidding (or RTB). This is where there are several advertisers on one side of the exchange trying to serve an ad to a particular customer on a website. This is managed through a demand-side platform (or DSP).

The available ad inventory you can use to place your ad are managed through a supply-side platform (or SSP). In the middle, there is the ad exchange, where all the advertisers are assessed and the one with the highest bid and quality score gets to serve their ad to the target customer. This is the bid auction and it's managed automatically and instantly by ad exchange servers, as thousands of advertisers are trying to serve ads to customers at any given time.

On the Google Display Network and on other real-time bidding platforms – such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, AdRoll, and so on – advertisers can optimize their maximum bids on targeting options for impressions and clicks. On the GDN, you can use default bids, custom bids, and bid adjustments to optimize how much you pay. Most video now uses automated bidding rather than custom manual bids or making bid adjustments.

If you can master the real-time bidding options on the GDN, which are like search and PPC bids, you can easily adapt them to other channels like Facebook, YouTube, and AdRoll, as they all follow similar pricing patterns.

Considerations before launching a bidding strategy

Before you launch your bidding strategy, there are a few things to consider.

First, think about your advertising goals – and specifically the advertising objectives for each of your campaigns. Keep them in mind as you prepare to launch and execute your bid strategy. Your strategy should always align with your goals.

Then, you need to decide what targeting methods and account structure to use to meet those objectives.

When launching a new campaign, it's recommended to start with an automated bid optimization strategy, such as Maximize Conversions or Maximize Clicks, which lets Google optimize your CPA and CPC. Again, the bidding strategy you choose should align with your campaign objective.

You could decide to run a fully automated campaign with the Performance Max option, which allows you to show ads across all Google properties such as YouTube, search, Gmail, shopping, and maps, as well as native formats in areas such as the Chrome home screen. With Performance Max, you can fully automate your bidding strategy, targeting, and placements to drive results based on your campaign goals and primary conversions. This campaign type integrates all automated functionality available in Google from targeting choice to ad serving and bidding.

How bidding strategies work together

Bidding strategies work together.

If you make multiple adjustments to the same campaign, all the bid adjustments will be multiplied together to determine how much your bid will increase or decrease.

Example

Let’s say you set a custom bid of $1.00 for the affinity audience ‘beachbound travelers’; a bid adjustment of +20% for the ‘female’ demographic; and a campaign-level location bid adjustment of +10% for people in Italy.

Google Ads will use your custom bid of $1.00 any time your ad shows to people associated with the selected interest. If the ad also shows to someone in the ‘female’ demographic, add +20% of your custom bid to your max. CPC bid, to make it $1.20 when your ad shows to these people. And if those people are in Italy, add +10% of your custom bid times your demographic bid adjustment, to make a max. CPC bid of $1.32.

Bid adjustments for device, location, audience and so on can be optimized automatically by your automated bidding strategy or manually as needed. Some bid modifiers are ignored when using automated AI-powered bidding such as Max Clicks, Conversions, or Conversion Value. And other adjustments can act as signals of priority. This is often the case with locations. However, device bid adjustments will be ignored unless using manual bid strategies.

You can alter your bids when your ads appear on desktops, tablets, and mobile devices by specifying a desktop, tablet, or mobile bid adjustment at the campaign level or at the ad group level.

Applying bid adjustments

You can apply bid adjustments for desktop, mobile, and tablet devices in your campaign settings:

1. In the campaigns or ad groups sections, select the campaigns or ad groups that you'd like to modify.
2. Under ‘device bid adjustment’ in the edit panel, enter a percentage value for “desktop’, ‘mobile’, and ‘tablet’ to increase or decrease bids and therefore ad visibility on these devices.
3. You can also enter ‘-100%’ to opt out of a device for the selected campaign or ad group.

It's important to recognize the behavior of your website visitors on different devices as mobile might drive a lot of traffic but no conversions or desktop traffic might be in decline. So, look at the performance of your devices and make the necessary adjustments to optimize your traffic.

Mobile-only display campaign

 If there is a business need based on significant performance differences based on devices, it can be useful, to create a mobile-only display campaign with a set daily budget and a desktop- or tablet-only duplicate of the campaign. That way, you can target the same audiences across devices, but you can choose to spend less on mobile traffic by giving it a lower daily spend to desktop traffic, if mobile traffic is of lower value. Google Ads automatically blends mobile and desktop traffic into the same campaign so they will share a daily budget, despite the devices offering different traffic values.

You can create a separate mobile campaign by duplicating your campaign in Google Ads. To do this:

1. Select the campaign, click edit, then copy and paste.
2. Add the word ‘mobile’ to your new duplicate campaign name so you know it's the mobile campaign.
3. In the setting section, choose additional settings and select the device type to all mobile devices.
4. Set the original campaign to target just tablet and computers in the additional setting section.

Separating your devices by campaign in display activity gives you much more control over how the user sees your ad and you can invest your budget in the most impactful device.