When to Use Device Level Bid Adjustments

Feb 3, 2020 | Product News

adVantage provides a bevy of campaign settings that help resellers and agencies set up ad campaigns that enable their advertisers’ ads to be shown to the right audiences, in the right place, at the right time, and on the right device.

What are Device Bid Adjustments?

Search networks such as Google & Bing provide the ability to adjust bids on a device level. This means that campaign managers can set bid levels for individual device types – desktop, tablet, and mobile. They can choose to advertise on only one device or on advertise on all, but allocate more budget towards one.

What is the Need for Device Bid Adjustments?

Device bid adjustments are a great way to optimize the performance of your advertisers’ campaigns across devices.

Businesses that offer “need now” solutions such as restaurants or plumbers, may benefit greatly from having their ads targeted more towards audiences using their mobile devices while searching or browsing the web. According to Merkle’s digital marketing report, mobile produced 61% of all paid search clicks in Q4 2019. Mobile devices also accounted for 89% of Facebook spend. It makes sense to capitalize on this audience flow.

On the other hand, businesses that usually see conversions after engaging a potential customer multiple times may be more inclined to invest in desktop or tablet advertising. B2B businesses, such as ad agencies, are a good example.

It is true that mobile offers more traffic and thus, more conversion opportunities. But when it comes to actual revenue numbers, desktop is the clear winner. According to Merkle’s digital marketing report, in Q4 2019, desktop paid search ads generated 63% higher revenue per click, when compared to mobile paid search ads. So, it would be unwise to discount the benefit of placing higher bids for desktop devices, for certain advertisers.

Below are a few benefits of device-specific bidding:

  • Allocating Budgets – Maximize your advertisers’ budgets by allocating funds to the devices that are most likely to be used by the people searching for products/services like theirs.
  • Timely Ad Delivery – People looking for services on mobile devices are usually in the market to convert. And thus for advertisers that offer need-now service, like restaurants, it is beneficial to able to target a greater amount of their ad spend towards mobile – right place, right time!
  • Everyone Wins – With the device bid adjustments functionality, campaign managers can add an additional layer of optimization to their advertisers’ campaigns and thus, offer better results. Device-level bidding helps advertisers target customers where they are most likely to interact and convert, thus, increasing their ROI. And lastly, customers get access to relevant search results. It is a win-win situation for all.

Device Level Bid Adjustments in adVantage

adVantage supports bid adjustments for desktop, tablet & mobile devices, for both Google and Bing. This feature offers percent adjustments for mobile, desktop and tablet bids.

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Best Practices

  • Targeting Mobile-Only Traffic – For businesses that see conversions coming predominantly from mobile devices, campaign managers should consider concentrating the bulk of the ad spend towards mobile by assigning mobile bids a higher % in the adVantage platform.
  • Excluding Mobile Traffic – Setting higher bids for mobile traffic may seem like a no brainer. However, if your advertiser’s website is not mobile-friendly, directing traffic to it may waste valuable ad spend. In which case, it may make sense to exclude mobile traffic altogether.