Bid Adjustment

A bid adjustment is a percentage increase or decrease in your bids. Bid adjustments allow you to show your ads more or less frequently based on where, when, and how people search. For example, sometimes a click is worth more to you if it comes from a smartphone, at a certain time of day, or from a specific location. You can also adjust your bids based on how your ads perform, helping to improve your return on investment (ROI). Your spending on individual clicks may vary as your bids increase or decrease according to the adjustments you’ve set, but your overall average daily budget won’t change.

How bid adjustments work

Say you’ve got a campaign that performs well on mobile devices with a max CPC bid of $1 USD. To show your ad to more customers on mobile devices, you increase your bid by 20% for searches on mobile devices, resulting in a final bid amount of $1.20 USD. Here’s the math:

Starting bid: $1 USD

Mobile adjustment: $1 USD + ($1 USD x 20%) = $1.20 USD

Resulting bid for searches on mobile devices: $1.20 USD

In another example, let’s say you have a $1 USD bid and would like to decrease it. To adjust it to $0.80 USD, select Decrease by 20%.

Even after building a high-quality ad with an excellent keyword list. You’re disappointed the ad isn’t being shown as much as you’d like. The reason is “Bid for the ad is too low.” With lower bids, your campaign is likely to receive fewer clicks and conversions. 

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.

Combined bid adjustments cannot exceed a 900% bid increase. 

Automated bidding

• If you are using automated Smart Bidding strategies including Target CPA, Target ROAS, Maximize conversions, and Maximize conversion value, you don’t need to make manual bid adjustments since those strategies automatically set bids to optimize for the conversion goal specified by the customer. If you make a manual bid adjustment to your automated Smart Bidding strategy it won’t be supported.
• Device bid adjustments for Target CPA allows you to modify the value of your CPA target, rather than the bids themselves.

Automated bidding takes the heavy lifting and guesswork out of setting bids to meet your performance goals. Each type of automated bid strategy is designed to help you achieve a specific goal for your business.

Automated bidding uses machine learning to algorithmically help you set the appropriate bid for each and every auction.

This chart outlines the bid adjustment types that are supported by each automated bid strategy used with a Search campaign.

Bid adjustment type	-100% possible?	Maximize clicks	Target Impression Share	Target CPA	Target ROAS	Maximize Conversions	Maximize Conversion Value
Device	+	+	-100% only	+*	-100% only	-100% only	-100% only
Location	–	+	–	–	–	–	–
Ad scheduling	–	+	–	–	–	–	–
Audiences(incl. RLSA)	–	+	–	–	–	–	–
Calls	–	+	–	–	–	–	–
Demographics	–	+	–	–	–	–	–

* = Treated as a target adjustment

Note: In cases where -100% adjustments aren’t possible, Smart Bidding strategies will still consider targeting and exclusions for each bid adjustment type.