

Note II: This is the sister improvement task to Raise Budget Cap. Both tasks are concerned with budget caps, but this task only shows when you campaign is performing poorly compared to your target CPA.

Why Reduce Campaign Keyword Bids?

We suggest reducing keyword bids across a campaign when a campaign is "budget limited" and performing poorly. Although counter-intuitive, lower bids should work to boost performance!

Reducing your bids will lower your average cost-per-click. A lower CPC should optimise your campaign, as you'll get more clicks for the same budget: you might appear in a lower ad position, but more frequently. 

Here's an (old school!) video with an in-depth explaination of the technique:

How does this improvement work? 

You'll see this improvement if a budget-limited campaign is performing poorly compared to your target CPA. Completing the improvement will reduce all keyword bids in the specific campaign by the advised percentage.

To help you decide whether you'd like to Reduce Bids or Dismiss the improvement, we'll compare stats from the last 30 days with our predictions for the next 30 days, including: 

  • Average cost-per-click.

  • Number of clicks received.

  • Total spend on the campaign.

Technical notes:

  • We'll ignore campaigns created fewer than eight days ago.

  • We'll ignore campaigns with shared budgets.

  • We'll ignore campaigns performing within +/-5% of your CPA target.

  • For calculating CPCs, we'll look at the last 30 days of data.

  • To find out if a campaign is budget-capped, we don't use the same method as AdWords. We'll consider a campaign budget-capped if it has spent over 85% of its budget on average over the last seven days. It's more aggressive than AdWords, but in our experience more appropriate.

  • The estimate of the spend, clicks and CPC after the bid reductions isn't going to be precisely accurate. The actual effect will depend on available extra impression inventory for that campaign.

Did this answer your question?