Bid Adjustments.
They’re in there, lurking in the Google Ads platform, but now largely unused. Why?
The Death of the Manual Lever
Back in the day, advertisers manually decided on a Max Bid for each and every keyword, and beyond that, would tweak a number of other segments, again, all manually.
With a dozen or more segments to tweak, and potentially dozens or hundreds of campaigns, that didn’t really scale.
With the advent of Smart Bidding, the system takes over to achieve desired outcomes based on predictive bidding to your targets. Target ROAS and Target CPA would be typical.
Smart Bidding can digest a complex picture that includes dozens of attributes of user sessions (including, within the bounds of data availability and privacy laws, that user’s browsing history).
If it’s doing its job correctly, in less than the blink of an eye, for the purposes of determining each advertiser’s Ad Rank, Smart Bidding compares a multivariate “snapshot” of each user and session to the “ideal” comparable user sessions that would produce desired outcomes for advertisers (ROAS, for example) in relation to keywords, user queries, or other targeting signals we’ve chosen to bid on. High predicted conversion rate and/or order value? The system enters your more aggressive bid, providing better visibility (eligibility and rank) in that ad auction.
That’s a long but accurate answer, then, to why advertisers no longer use Bid Adjustments!
Which Levers Still Do Anything?
That’s a big change. What about customization to a particular client need? What if we want to pull some of the old levers, but not others?
Before I forget, let’s review a few of the obvious, available Bid Adjustments:
- Geo
- Device
- Dayparting
- Demographics such as Gender, Age, and Household Income
- Audiences (Google-constructed)
- Audiences (your first-party data)
Many novices today are under the mistaken impression that they are “bidding on” Audiences, but the Smart Bidding override actually means they aren’t. Their ignorance extends beyond Audiences. When we audit Google Ads accounts, we sometimes find account managers dutifully working on changing Bid Adjustments for segments like Device, when in fact that lever is no longer hooked up to anything (assuming Smart Bidding is in force).
The Workarounds That Still Work
Is there any hope of bringing back some of the old customization and excitement to Google advertising? One needn’t merely hope. It’s lurking, but only partially.
You can, of course, enable and tweak Bid Adjustments anytime a campaign’s Bid Strategy is set to Manual. For some accounts, this is the best way to go.
There are also a couple of sneaky ways to set overrides. These aren’t in traditional Bid Adjustments, but elsewhere in Campaign Settings.
Beyond that, most campaign types allow for bid adjustments of -100% (yep, all or nothing) for some segments. For example, if a Demand Gen campaign is conceived as higher-funnel and it’s not imperative to reach everyone out there – and moreover, your KPI’s are weak enough that they don’t set a clear “realized revenue” differentiator – you could just narrow the targeting as opposed to letting the system attempt to learn across a wider swath of humanity. Pick one-third of the country to target geographically, exclude all men, and exclude anyone outside of your most desired age demographic.
Workarounds are more plentiful than they appear. Unlike Fortune 500 mass market strategies, small to midsized ad budgets often need to be concentrated for maximum impact. So, I hope the above example was instructive.
The Rebirth Google Hasn’t Finished Building
When it comes to certain platform overrides that offer an alternative to the old Bid Adjustments approach: the architecture is ready to go within Google Ads, but it’s not yet fully built out by Google. I fully hope and expect that Google will someday see fit to expand this functionality substantially, to bring back some of the old customization while allowing advertisers to realize the benefit of increasingly sophisticated predictive bidding to ROAS and CPA targets.
One example of a handy override (let’s say, for keyword search and Performance Max campaigns) would be to allow advertisers to make (via % bid adjustments) exceptions for some geographic areas. When too many different types of buyers are treated similarly, as “just ROAS waiting to happen,” Smart Bidding can be slow to learn, and it can learn the wrong things. And setting up specific campaigns to address local anomalies is not a great solution, if you’re like me and would rather an Occam’s Razor approach to account architecture that limits the total number of campaigns.
In the meantime, we’ll continue to work some campaigns using the Manual bid strategy, and deploy some “sneaky ways to set overrides,” while maintaining a primary emphasis on Smart Bidding.
If you suspect your campaigns are relying entirely on default Smart Bidding—or worse, that your manager is manually tweaking dead settings—it’s time to check under the hood. Get in touch with us!