Bid adjustment

A bid adjustment is a percentage correction that raises or lowers your bid for a specific context, such as a device, location, time or audience. This way you pay more for the clicks that are valuable to you and less for the rest, without overhauling your entire bid strategy.

How does a bid adjustment work?

You set a base bid and steer it per segment with a percentage. If visitors perform worse on mobile, you set a negative adjustment on mobile. If a certain region converts strongly, you raise your bid there through geo-targeting. You can also steer times with ad scheduling, for example a higher bid during office hours when B2B decision-makers are active.

Bid adjustment and automated bidding

With fully automated strategies such as target CPA or target ROAS, the algorithm takes over many of these decisions itself, and most bid adjustments no longer have any effect. The algorithm already processes device, location and time as signals. With manual bidding or partial automation, bid adjustments remain a powerful steering instrument. What fits therefore depends on which Smart Bidding approach you use.

Why we use bid adjustments in a targeted way

A bid adjustment is only justified when the data supports it, not on gut feeling. At Customer Impact we first check whether a segment truly converts better or worse before we touch it. The goal is always the same: shift your budget toward the searches and audiences that produce customers and revenue, rather than toward traffic that looks good but delivers nothing.