How to Use Bid Adjustments to Get More Out Of your AdWords Enhanced Campaigns

Enhanced campaigns means some of the aspects have been changed and new aspects have been introduced. You can find and implement bid adjustment options in the bidding strategy. As each bid adjustment affects each other, think more before you set the bid adjustment.

How Do Bid Adjustment Percentages Influence my Bids?

You can set the bid adjustments for individual adgroups and also whole campaign. The bid adjustment percentages you can set are from -90 to 300. Look how your bids are influenced if you set different bid adjustments.
$10 at -100% = $0
$10 at -90% = $1
$10 at -40% = $6
$10 at 100% = $10
$10 at 150% = $15
$10 at 200% = $20
$10 at 300% = $30

Location-Based Adjustments Allow You To Manage Location Targeting More Granularly:

You need to check the list to eliminate the regions having poor performance before you set the bid adjustments for individual locations. For example in the below example, Texas and Quebec regions should be removed from the campaign because of their poor performance.

You can set bid adjustment of -40% for Texas and Quebec to lower the high conversion costs. This results in lower cost per click.

How to Set a Location-Based Bid Adjustment:

You should add different locations to your campaign. If you target entire US, then you can include the state and area to which you need to adjust bid instead of doing it for individual state.
The first step is to add the area:

You can set the bid adjustment for each after you add the areas as shown in the below screenshot:

You will be asked to either decrease or increase the bid. You can choose the option decrease your bid by 40% instead of mentioning -40%.

Hourly and Day-of-the-Week Bid Adjustments (AKA Ad Scheduling):

You can adjust your bids based on hour of the day and day of the week. You can decrease the costs spend at certain times of day such as 8pm if nobody is able to answer phone. You can observe conversion rates varying at different times of day due to hourly bid adjustments.

We can notice from the above table that the cost per conversion is higher from 7am to 9am compared to others. You can get more conversions at low cost in certain times of day such as lunch, late afternoon and in the evening. You can get even more conversions in these times if you increase your exposure. If you set only one bid adjustment then your campaigns will be deactivated at other times. 

 In the above example, the bid adjustment is set from 6pm to Midnight in all days so the campaign is not running from 00:00am to 6:00am. You also have to set bid adjustment specifying day or time.

Mobile Bid Adjustments:

If your website is optimized for mobile traffic then you want to maximize the traffic you get from mobile. If you don't have a mobile website then you should decrease the bids for mobile. Google says that you can decrease your bids by 20%. First you need to analyze your campaign, find and set the next bid adjustments for your mobile traffic.

Multiple Bid Adjustments Influence Each Other:

All your bid adjustments will influence each other. You need to be careful while setting the bid adjustments and know how they affect your bidding. For example, if you have set a 100% location bid adjustment and 150% bid adjustment for mobile your $10 bid changes to $22.5 bid.