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Campaign Optimization

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Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

Set bid adjustments

After you have optimized your Google Ads quality score and set your bid strategy, there’s an additional feature in your campaign optimization called bid adjustments.

This works on different levels:

  • Device level: You can bid certain amounts for mobile traffic. If you want to show more on mobile, you can say, “Well, I want to bid 10% more for mobile traffic because it’s very valuable to me.” Or if mobile traffic isn’t valuable to you, you can say, “I want to bid 50% or 100% less on mobile traffic.” If you bid minus 100% that means you’ve cut out mobile altogether.
  • Location level: You can also bid for certain locations. For example, if you’re advertising in the UK where you find that London is a particularly good zone for conversions, you might say, “I’m willing to pay 20% more for a click if the searcher is from London.”
  • Audience level: Using your remarketing you’re able to bid on different audiences. And we’ll talk a little bit about remarketing later for search because it’s slightly different than the type of remarketing we would do for display.

Device bid adjustments

If most of your conversions happen on a desktop you might want to increase your bids by 10%. If most of your research happens on a mobile and it’s research, you might want to reduce your bids by 15%. You might say, “I want to drive the research traffic, but at the same time I want to pay a little bit less for it.” And you can add your bid adjustment to your devices by choosing the Devices section in the left-hand tab, and adding your bid adjustment there. It’s very straightforward, and it’s literally you add a percentage bid adjustment up or down depending on the device, a mobile, tablet or desktop, and what you want to do.

Location and exclusion targeting

Your location targeting allows you to bid for certain locations. It’s set up in exactly the same way as mobile and on desktop bidding. So, over in the left-hand menu you’ve got your locations tab, and beside each location you’re able to add a percentage up or down depending on how much you want to bid up or down for that particular location.

Ad scheduling

We’ve also talked about ad scheduling as an important factor for driving efficiency in your campaigns. So, you’re able to bid up and down at certain points of the day. You can turn your ads on and off at certain points of the day and days of the week. And you can say, “I’m willing to pay 20% more for traffic between 11:00 in the morning and 2:00 in the afternoon, because that’s when most of my conversions happen.” So you can bid more aggressively at the time when you know conversions are likely to happen, and therefore hopefully beat the competition to those clicks. It’s a very good way of deep diving into the purchase timings around your activity.

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Cathal Melinn

Cathal Melinn is a digital strategist, lecturer, and trainer. He has over 15 years’ experience in eCommerce, social media, affiliate marketing, data analytics, and all things digital. He worked at Yahoo! Search in 2005 as a Senior Search Strategist for the UK Financial Services vertical. He moved to the world of agency in 2010 as Head of Search and Online Media. Cathal’s previous clients include Apple, Vodafone, Expedia, Virgin, Universal Music Group, Amazon, Compare the Market, and HSBC.

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    ABOUT THIS DIGITAL MARKETING MODULE

    Paid Search
    Cathal Melinn
    Skills Expert

    This module begins with the key concepts of paid search and demonstrates how to set up a Google Ads account and create a paid search campaign. It explains how to manage a paid search campaign budget effectively and outlines the different methods that can be used to optimize your paid search campaign. It also covers how to measure and report on the success of a paid search campaign.

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