In the world of AdWords optimizations, the more automated things get, the easier life becomes. While initially intimidating to users who are unfamiliar with them; building automated scripts can be a game changer for your campaigns.
In this post we will cover the 24 hour bidding strategy. The platform has a limitation of 6 bid changes per day based on the hour of the day. The 24/7 schedule bidding script will allow you to adjust bids up or down each hour, every day.
Don’t worry! This 24/7 bidding strategy won’t increase your daily budgets, it will either limit the keyword bid or push it ahead in the opportune hour of each day of the week. Higher converting hours will bid higher, while lower converting hours will decrease to save budget. The platform will shift the daily budget around to the hour most likely to produce conversions.
AdWords Set-up
Script Data Analysis
Segment the data by:
- Brand and Non-brand campaigns/ campaign groups
- Mobile vs Tablet vs Desktop device
Data to review: Conversions
- Conversion rate
- Click-through-rate
- Cost per conversion
For the purposes of this example, let’s look at conversion volume. When looking to design a 24/7 bidding strategy, pull your data for the past 3-6 months for conversions in the reports tab with campaign, hour of the day, day of the week, and conversions. Pivot the data in excel so it looks like the below, with each day of the week split into hours 0 – 23.
Once these are broken out into a schedule, analyze and identify 4 or 5 buckets of conversion results. A conservative start would be to break out into -25%, -10%, 0%, 10%, and a 15% modifier. On your 24/7 chart, exchange your conversion numbers with % bid modifiers and place them in a Google Doc for the actual script to leverage.
After you implement the bidding script in the platform, you always want to preview the effects it will have. Automation can blow through a budget very quickly. When previewing, the platform will start removing any scheduled bid modifications currently running in the campaign which are positive. When the script is live, you can go into any campaign applied and it should have the next 4 hours highlighted in the 24/7 chart.
Initial Results
We recently had the opportunity to apply this script bidding strategy to one of our global tech client’s non-brand campaigns. The results speak for themselves. After enabling the automatic bidding script, the month over month differences were impressive! By spending 16% less budget, we produced a 14% increase in conversion volume, a 29% increase in conversion rate, 14% increase in revenue driven, and 35% increase in the return on ad spend.
Automated scripts allowed the platform to bid higher at times of stronger intent and drastically improved performance. Be sure to monitor the performance on a regular basis, checking the bid adjustments are having a positive influence across each hour of each day! Ah…there’s nothing like a proactive strategy that requires small efforts of ongoing maintenance!
Check out our approach to Paid Search as a channel, or contact us to chat through the new channels we’re testing!!