Like with any marketing campaign, it’s vital that you target the most interested shoppers on Google Shopping. Targeting specific devices could be especially beneficial for your campaigns, as could increasing or decreasing your CPC at specific times of the day and/or holiday periods.
Why? Well, here's the short answer: taking advantage of both device bid modifiers and dayparting can help you take advantage of peaks in traffic during specific time periods and on different devices. This helps to reduce wasted and spend and increase your ROI. To really understand how they can help, you'll have to continue reading.
What are device bid modifiers?
Exactly what it says on the tin! Device bid modifiers allow you to change your bid depending on the device your shoppers are using. This is split into desktop, mobile, and tablet. But what’s the value in spending even more time adding more bid modifiers?
Depending on your retail industry and your target audience, you may notice you get more conversions on a specific device, while others are more commonly used for top-of-funnel browsing or in-depth research.
Some retailers find that shoppers begin their purchase journey on a mobile or tablet, and then convert on a desktop. If this is the case, increasing your CPCs for ‘awareness’ search terms for mobile and tablet devices can help improve your visibility and meet shoppers in that initial stage.
On the flip side, if your audience doesn't tend to view your ads on desktops, then you can lower your bids in order to maximize your ROAS.
We highly recommend taking advantage of device bid modifiers to optimize your campaign performance and avoid wasting your ad spend.
What is dayparting?
Dayparting is the PPC strategy used to target traffic during specific periods of the day and week. To achieve this, you’ll need to adjust your CPC to move up and down the carousel. By increasing your CPCs, you can increase the visibility of your ads and improve your click-through rate.
Did you know the ‘first impression’, or tile on the carousel, wins nearly two-thirds of clicks regardless of price or relevancy?
Bear in mind that you won’t always want to win those clicks: people are more likely to click and checkout at different times of the day and week, again, depending on your audience, the region and the retail price of your items.
Typically, advertisers adjust their bid values according to on-peak and off-peak periods. The best way to unlock your own optimum checkout times is to look at historic data to find successful periods of sales.
Here’s an example we share time and time again:
Let’s say you sell home furnishings. Maybe your audience researches furniture retailers during their morning commute. When they get to work, their phone goes away until lunchtime, around 12-2pm. During their break, they might return to their search with an idea of what they want in mind.
As they return home, they’re doing more in-depth research around specific models and seeing how one retailer’s offering compares to another’s. It’s no surprise that making costly purchases aren’t impulse decisions. Often, these kinds of decisions are made in the evening or on weekends, after plenty of research.
But that’s purely an example - make sure to find out exactly how your customers are interacting with your ads, and what time of day (or week) purchases are completed! Once you know the most popular times for your target audience, you can increase or decrease bids accordingly, and only increase CPCs at popular times.
Automating your bid adjustments
An automated management solution can constantly monitor and adjust bids in real-time according to search traffic, click-through rates, and conversion rates. The power to change bids based on fluctuations in traffic can help you get the best ROAS for your campaigns.
Bidnamic’s machine learning platform uses our very own Reliable Tracking Period technology (RTP) to ensure your existing pixels or tracking snippets have been working accurately.
What's a tracking pixel? All your tags and tracking questions answered here
Having ensured your tracking is set up correctly from the get-go, we use your historical data for modeling the CPC required to achieve the target ROAS. This information is then used to determine which device bid modifier should be used, and to inform and action new CPCs at a value that doesn’t jeopardize ROAS or profitability for each individual SKU.
Find out how we can help you maximize your Google Shopping campaigns by booking a demo with one of our specialists.
• See how the search volumes for your category are changing
• Make sure you’re optimizing for conversion rate
• Drive performance by targeting search terms in your campaigns
