Learn How to Set Your Google Ads Bid Adjustments

What are Google Ads bid adjustments and how do they work?

Bid adjustments is a very useful and powerful feature of Google Ads that helps you adjust the percentage of your budget spent depending on when, where and how people search. As an example, your business might value a click more when it comes from the desktop during the morning hours. In that case, you will want to spend a bigger part of your budget on these clicks compared to others that come from smartphones during the nighttime. Find here Google Ads Best Practices.

Bid adjustments are set by percentages. In the example used above, you would want to increase your bid on searches coming from desktops by 20% as a rough estimate. You can also decide to decrease bids for searches coming from mobile devices by 20%. In this post we will cover the different types of bid adjustments Google is offering and give some tips to help you optimize your advertising efforts.

Types of Google Ads Bid Adjustments

There are 8 types of bid adjustments:

Device

You can adjust your bids in order to control the frequency that your ads are shown on specific devices, computers, tablets and mobile devices.

Location

Location bid adjustments will allow you to control how frequently your ads are shown in certain countries or cities.

Ad scheduling

By using ad scheduling bid adjustments, you will be able to increase or decrease your bids for campaigns that run only on certain days or during certain hours.

Top content

If you are using a YouTube channel to advertise, Google will allow you to configure adjustments on your bids for content that is more popular and has a great number of impressions per day. This content usually gets more traffic and higher user engagement.

Targeting methods

On the Display and Search network you can set bid adjustments for specific topics, placements and other targeting methods.

Remarketing lists for search ads

Once you have remarketing lists set, you can use bid adjustments for these lists if you want specific people who belong to these lists to see your ads more often.

Interactions

This type of bid adjustment will control how often your call extensions and call-only ads are appearing to users. By increasing the bids for mobile devices, your call interaction ads will appear more often to mobile phone users.

Demographics

Demographic bid adjustments will determine how frequently your ads are shown to people of a certain age, income or gender.

About multiple bid adjustments

In general, when you configure multiple bid adjustments, Google will multiply them in order to decide how much your bid will be modified. However, multiple device and location bid adjustments don’t follow the same rule. 

If you configure device bid adjustments in both campaign and ad group levels, Google will use the ad group’s adjustment for the final bid. However, this will only happen if there is a 100% decrease in the campaigns-level device bid adjustment.

Also, Google won’t combine different bid adjustments that you set for the same location. For instance, if you configure an adjustment of +50% for Spain, and +100% for Barcelona, Google will only use the adjustment for Barcelona (the most specific one) and the traffic coming from Barcelona.

Things to keep in mind:

• Combined bid adjustments cannot exceed a 900% bid increase. 
• The lowest possible bid adjustment when combining multiple bid adjustments is -90%. (Source: Google support)

Best bid adjustments practices

Now that you have a firmer grasp on the concept of bid adjustments, the question is: What are the best practices to optimize the use of bid adjustments for your business?

Gather enough data

Before you start using bid adjustments you will need to gather enough data. Having a limited amount of conversion data may lead to misleading conclusions. Once you have the information you need, you’ll have an idea of what, when, who and where most of your conversions are made.

Set your business goals

What goals do you have for each campaign? Do you want more customers to call you? Do you want to raise brand awareness? Do you want to increase your conversions? If you have well defined business goals, it will only help you to later decide if you need to increase or decrease your bids on specific segments of customers.

Focus on campaign-level adjustments

We recommend you to use bid adjustments for campaign-level and not in ad groups. This is because they are based on more data, making it so you feel more secure making decisions. However, you can use ad group modifiers if you experience significant performance differences within your campaigns.