Mobile Bid Formula Designed by Google – How to Get Your Bid Right!

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McCord Web Services is a Google Partner and Nancy McCord is a Certified Professional.

This past month across a number of AdWords accounts I’ve started to see a drop in conversions as Google AdWords more strongly serves ads in the mobile space. With click costs, impressions and click through rates nearly the same as the past 30 days when there were healthy conversions, I had to dig deep to identify what was plaguing a number of client accounts.

I found that by serving more strongly in mobile, AdWords had forced my conversions lower. By adjusting the mobile bid using a formula that my Google Rep., Kelsey Bowers, shared with me this week, I am working to boost conversions back to the appropriate level.

Kelsey told me that Google has done extensive statistical testing to come up with this formula and I’d like to share it with you.

Here’s what I do. Go to the Campaign tab, then go to the setting tab, and then go to the device tab. Make sure that these columns in your view, if not click customize columns to add them – conversions, cost per conversion, and conversion rate.

By campaign use this formula to decide your mobile bid:

(Mobile conversion rate divided by Desktop conversion rate) -1 times 100 = mobile bid adjust up or down.

Make sure that before you finish, you look at your mobile versus desktop cost per conversion. If you are spending nearly the same budget or more in mobile versus desktop and have no conversions in either space do a 90% deduction in bid in mobile or wait to get more data to make a good decision on what is right for your needs.

I found that the ad serving changes that I saw this month reflected a big increase in ad serving in the mobile space and that I was paying too much for exposure at the expense of account conversion generation. With a few quick change our clients will be back on track in no time.

If you are looking for quality AdWords help to boost conversions and troubleshoot issues in your AdWords account, I invite you to find out more about my firm.