Using AdWords Bid Adjustment Schedules for Your Business

AdWords bid adjustment schedules allow you to increase or decrease your bid rate during different times of day. These adjustments can be set from -90% to 300% to choose an optimal bid rate. You can choose the size of increment you would like to adjust. Depending on your data, you may choose to adjust by day of the week, 2-8 hour increments, or hourly. It can be advantageous for businesses to break down their bid schedule to an hourly increment if their data supports it. Once you determine your campaign goal you can review your data to decide which increment of time will work best for the schedule.

Schedule based on website traffic or store business hours.
Some businesses who also have brick and mortar stores choose to adjust their bids based on their business hours. This way they will not be encouraging people to call when their call center is not open. This strategy would not be applicable if you are trying to drive customers to your ecommerce store. In that case, look at your data to determine which hours have the most site traffic and adjust your bid accordingly. For example, let’s say you make the highest amount of ecommerce sales between the hours of 7pm and 9pm, but between 1am and 4am sales are very low. You can increase your bid rate between 7pm and 9pm to allow for more click through and decrease your bid between 1am and 4am to cut unnecessary spending.

Don’t schedule just one day.
It is important to note that setting one bid adjustment will stop the ad from running the rest of the time. You must schedule a full week for the campaign to continue running. For example, you may want to increase your bid on Saturday nights between 8pm and 10pm because your website generally has more traffic and generates more sales during that time. It is tempting to only set an adjustment for those hours on Saturday evening to optimize your click through rate. However, ignoring the rest of the week will only allow your ad to run during the hours that you have set (between 8pm and 10pm) and the ad will not run the rest of the week. You must set up the bid schedule for the full week in order to keep the ad running.

Check in frequently and adjust your bid when necessary.
AdWords bidding is not an exact science, so check your campaigns frequently. If a certain time period is coming in below your goal, decrease the bid adjustment, and if a time period is exceeding your goal, increase the bid adjustment. It will take some time to get everything running smoothly, but don’t give up! Using bid adjustment schedules can help to optimize your ad campaign so your ads get in front of the right people to achieve your goals.

If you would like to learn more about managing your AdWords account, contact the Stellar Blue team. We can help!