Recent numbers from Google have shown that more than half of the searches going through their search engine are now happening on mobile devices. This is a big milestone, and a sign of a big trend of people using their mobile devices for searching more and more. Of course, this trend is expected to continue long into the future.
With this in mind, Google has announced that they are going to be making some significant changes to the ways that advertisers, marketers and others who buy ads handle setting their bids and targeting.
The first major adjustment is that ads targeting desktops and tablets are no longer linked. It is clear that people use PC’s and tablets differently, so this is a smart move that likely should have occurred some time ago. Another change will allow advertisers to set the focal point of their campaigns to mobile searches. This is going to be very helpful for local businesses who can benefit more from mobile searches than desktops.
So, to put it simply, the initial changes will make it possible for marketers to set specific bid levels for mobile, tablets and desktop searches. This is one of those things that just makes since because savvy marketers know that each of these sources of traffic has a different value.
Senior Vice President of Ads and Commerce, Sridhar Ramaswamy, commented on the move saying, “This lets you anchor your base keyword bid to the device most valuable to your business and then set bid adjustments for each of the other devices. You will also have a wider range to adjust bids up to +900%.”
So, to put it simply, if you set up a campaign for desktop that has a max bid of $2 per click you can set tablet searches to go +100% ($4 per click) or minus 50% ($1 per click). This is also going to make it far easier to set up your campaigns to get the results you’re looking for.
You can read more about the changes in Google’s blog post announcement HERE.
