Paid Search Campaign Optimization

Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

What are bid adjustments in manual bidding?

After you have optimized your Google Ads quality score and set your bid strategy, there’s an additional feature in your campaign optimization called ‘bid adjustments’. This works on different levels, but (if you’re using manual bidding) its main role is to allow for better control over your ad visibility – that is when and where your ad appears.

A bid adjustment is a percentage change in your bid to increase or decrease your ad’s visibility on certain devices, in specific locations, to specific audiences, or at certain times of the day. Bid adjustments are applied on top of the bids that Google Ads uses to show your ad, thus resulting in more or less visibility for your keywords and ads. Adjustments from -90% to +900% can be set for any campaign, or ad group level, aiming to increase or decrease visibility of the keywords and ads in those campaigns and Ad Groups. Just to note, Smart bid strategies will modify and even override existing bid adjustments to increase or decrease visibility as the algorithm optimizes performance for you.

Why use bid adjustments?

You can let the AI set automatic bid changes for devices, demographics, remarketing lists, and locations. Or you can add manual bid adjustments yourself when using manual bidding.

So why would you use bid adjustments for devices, for example? Well, searchers might research on a phone but then convert on a desktop. So, in this case, you might want to increase your bids by 10% for desktop searches while reducing your bids by 15% for searchers using mobile. This effectively allows you to increase visibility for your most valuable converting customers on desktops, while reducing exposure on lower value searches when they are researching on mobile device. This setting prioritizes your most valuable device type in terms of conversions. The same thinking can be applied to manage visibility in high- and low -priority locations, audiences, time of day, and so on.

It's important to note that those ‘research’ searches will ultimately lead to conversions, so you need to find the balance between mobile and desktop traffic, or research and conversion traffic. Both are valuable and will work in unison to drive results so, as mentioned, balance is key.

How to bid on devices

When using manual bidding, you can add a bid modifier for an entire campaign by clicking on the Devices tab in the left-hand menu in Google Ads. Simply add the percentage (%) you want to increase or decrease the bid by for the device type and then choose Save. These are often overruled when using smart bidding and even though it can act as a signal to the algorithm of your device priority, it may ignore this altogether.

With bid adjustments, you can create mobile-only, desktop-only, or tablet-only campaigns. To understand if it’s better to use mobile bid adjustments or create mobile-only campaigns, you need to look at CPA for mobile and desktop conversions in your campaigns. If they are vastly different, and mobile spend is a much higher percentage of your overall spend in the campaign, it might be worth creating a mobile-only version of your campaign.

You can do this by copying the campaign and appending the word mobile to the end of the new campaign name. Set the desktop and tablet bid adjustment in the mobile campaign to -100% and set the mobile bid adjustment in the desktop or tablet campaign to -100%. This ensures that only mobile traffic goes through the mobile campaign, and only desktop and tablet traffic go through the desktop or tablet campaigns.

Creating mobile-only campaigns allows you to effectively decide how much daily budget you want to spend on mobile traffic at the campaign daily budget level. While bid adjustments are perhaps easier to manage than running separate device-based campaigns, using bid adjustments alone can lead to mixed results, especially if you have a poor mobile experience, or if users are less likely to convert on a mobile device.

Location and exclusion targeting

Another form of campaign optimization involves location and exclusion targeting. It can be used with both Smart and manual bidding.

This is a setting that helps you show your ads to customers in a selected geographic location, while excluding other locations. This means you’re effectively targeting territories where your consumers are already located, or perhaps committing a portion of your overall budget to showing ads in places you’d like to expand into.

You can select your locations, increase bids manually using adjustments, or let the AI increase or decrease the bids for high-value locations. You can also exclude certain locations from your campaigns when using both Smart and manual bidding.

By enabling you to select your locations and automatically increasing bids for high-value regions, location bid adjustments drive performance and ROI. For example, if you’re advertising in the UK and you find that London is a particularly good zone for high-value conversions, you might decide to pay 20% more for a click if a searcher is based in London. You’re basically securing traffic from high-value locations by telling Google you are willing to pay more for this click.

You can manually add a percentage bid for a location in the Locations tab in the left-hand menu in Google Ads, just like we saw with device bid adjustments. Simply add the percentage you want to increase or decrease the bid by for the specific location and hit Save. Similarly, you can choose Exclusions from the Locations menu to add locations where you specifically don't want to show your ads in.

Scheduling ads

A crucial element of campaign optimization for ad rank involves scheduling your ads. In fact, it is essential for driving efficiency in your campaigns. By optimizing your ads’ scheduling, you can set times when your ads are active throughout the week. Similarly, you can pause activity automatically at specific times of the day or week to match your consumer buying patterns, and so on.

The best practice here is to review your conversion and peak traffic times as well as lower activity times, and then set higher or lower bids during these hours, or days, to optimize your campaign performance. This might mean paying 20% more for traffic between 11am and 2pm, because that’s when most of your conversions happen. So, you can bid more aggressively at the time when you know conversions are likely to happen, and therefore aim to beat the competition for those clicks. Again, automated bid strategies will optimize and even override your ad scheduling based on the machine learning data used in the algorithm, which aims to show your ads only at the best times to deliver on your objectives.

Why schedule ads?

Scheduling ads is a very good way of deep diving into the purchase patterns around your activity. Searchers sometimes convert at peak traffic times, for example. By reviewing conversion metrics and times over several weeks or months, you may spot trends. You can then focus your activity on conversion hot spots, and test the impact on overall conversions

Bear in mind, however, that sometimes searchers are busy researching before they convert. Where possible, it’s important to establish this research period of the sales cycle to inform your ad scheduling.

For manual bidding, ad scheduling can be added in the Ad Schedule tab in the left-hand menu of a campaign in Google Ads. Simply click the times and days you want to run the ads and save the timetable. Campaigns using Smart bidding will create an ad schedule powered by AI data in the backend of the system.

You cannot see or modify Smart bidding ad schedules because they are dynamically based on your objective and new data in the AI.

Now that you've mastered the fundamentals of account management and optimization, you can start to look at advanced features for bulk management, automation, testing and different campaign types to take your paid search activity to the next level.