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).
To dive a little deeper, make sure to check out Google’s handy table Considerations Around Bid Adjustments – Automated Bidding, near the bottom of their help page “About bid adjustments.”
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.
Exclusions
Lurking inside of campaign types like Demand Gen is the ability to fully exclude segments you don’t want to show ads to. You can’t set adjustments, though. Keep this “all or nothing” targeting strategy in your back pocket anyway.
If you dig in, you’ll notice Audiences such as Gender, Age, and even Household Income and Parental Status.
But a big caveat here. Google won’t necessarily display full data on this, given privacy policies and users whose identity is uncertain or unknown.
So while it might be tempting in this campaign to exclude anyone who isn’t a parent (based on our campaign goals), whoops, it turns out that segment actually performs better. Who knows why? Maybe it’s related to gifting, or more likely, the identifier is simply inaccurate much of the time for whatever reason.
For the most part, the system should learn anyway. If you really feel the need to exclude men from a campaign focused on women’s products, you probably shouldn’t. Under Smart Bidding, the volume should drop if that’s warranted, based on performance.
With that being said, it’s important to understand which levers are still available to us.
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!