Google will soon be giving advertisers much more control over their device change-level bidding in AdWords. The changes were announced in San Francisco, at the Google Performance Summit. During the summit, Google also stated that it oversees a trillio global searches, with over half of the searches coming from mobile devices.
For a few years now, many have felt it slightly awkward to have bids on desktop, despite the huge increase of mobile use. Many advertisers have found it difficult to gauge mobile since all bids are restricted to desktop. To resolve this issue, Google announced that advertisers will soon be able to adjust bids for separate device types – mobile, desktop and tablet.
Sridhar Ramaswamy, the senior vice president of Ads and Commerce, stated in the blog post “This lets you anchor your base keyword bid to the device most valuable to your business and then set bid adjustments for each of the other devices. You will also have a wider range to adjust bids, up to +900%,”
The will apply to every campaign type, regardless of if keyword targeting is used or not.
The Implications
– The return of tablet bidding.
– Mobile is now eligible for base bids with bid modifiers for tablet and desktop
The new change is a further progression of Enhanced Campaigns, and also reverses Google’s disliked decision of grouping tablets and desktops in a base bid.
How to Use It
When the changes do arrive in the coming months, you’ll be able to set a default/base bid for a specific device and also have the opportunity to set bid adjustments for the remaining two, with ranges from -100 percent to +900 percent. If you choose not to set a bid adjustment, it would be comparable to not setting a mobile bid adjustment.
Advertisers will now be able to anchor their base bid to mobile, and set the bid adjustments for tablet and desktop after – the baseline would be mobile.
Ramasawamy also stated in his blog post “With more controls, you can now optimize with greater precision while keeping things simple with a single campaign that reaches consumers across devices”.
It will be interesting to see how advertisers are able to take advantage of the new functionality. The announcement and changes will lead to a new set of best practices and new methods.
