Why we should all be celebrating Adwords’ device bidding upgrade

Innovations / June 12, 2016

How to make Adwords new bid adjustment by device work for you

Adwords has made it possible to adjust bids by device for quite some time, but it wasn’t perfect. Bidding was always anchored to desktop and tablet, which gave advertisers limited flexibility.

Currently Adwords enables you to set your default bid at the desktop/tablet level, and then adjust your mobile bid against it. There are two problems with this. First, desktop and tablet are anchored together, with no ability to adjust these two devices separately. Second, your mobile bid adjustments are always based on your initial desktop/tablet bid.

Very soon, advertisers will be able to prioritize device bidding based on their unique metrics and business objectives. You will be able to set mobile, desktop and tablet bids independently. Or you can anchor any one device bid and set the other bids in relation to it. What’s more, you will soon be able to adjust all device bids from -100 percent to +900 percent.

With mobile becoming the most important driver of traffic and revenue for many businesses, it no longer made sense to anchor device bids to the desktop. By delinking tablet from desktop, advertisers will be able to decide for themselves how they adjust bids for tablet. This is so sensible, it was inevitable.

How to make bid adjustment by device work for you

Get ready now, so you know exactly how you want to tweak your campaigns when this upgrade rolls out. Start by assessing how your campaigns are converting on different devices. Once you know this, you can easily adjust bids separately for each device.
Here’s how:

1. Calculate your value per click: divide the total revenue on each device by the number of clicks on that device.
2. Anchor yourself to one device… in this case, let’s anchor to desktop. This is the device that you will adjust against — i.e. adjust your mobile bid a percentage higher or lower than your desktop bid.
3. Divide your value per click on mobile by your value per click on desktop. This will tell you the ratio of mobile to desktop conversion value.

The formula looks like this:
Mobile bid adjustment = 100% x ( (Value Per Mobile Click / Value Per Desktop Click) -1)

With the growing importance of mobile, it is crucial to be able to calculate the value of traffic generated by each device, and adapt accordingly. Google’s upcoming upgrade enables all of us to get more granular with our device targeting, based solely on our own objectives and success.