For years many people have wanted to negative bid adjust on tablet traffic. While Adwords constantly said stupid things like “Tablet converts just as well if not better than Desktop Traffic”. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had reps tell me this and the urge to slap someone would creep in. I’m a very peaceful person mind you but I really hate seeing thousands of dollars flushed down a drain for myself and clients because it was clear test after test that tablet traffic in about 80% of all cases just sucks and there was no way to get profitable on it for many of my clients.
This was even more true in the software industry where they only offered Desktop software. I would easily spend 5 grand on tablet traffic without a single conversion over the course of a few months. I know from the 100’s of AdWords experts I hang around with we all hate not having the option to negative bid adjust on tablet traffic.
The AdWords Announcement in late May
It was on May 24th I think that I was watching an AdWords announcement on what was coming down the pipe line. They kept announcing new and exciting changes but the audience didn’t seem to be that excited. The second AdWords said they where going to allow for negative bid adjustments on Tablet traffic the whole room broke out in applause. It was seriously crazy how excited people got. I myself did a two handed fist pump in the air to celebrate.
Negative bid Adjusting on Tablets
Just yesterday I logged into my AdWords Agency account and found out that I could negative bid adjust on Tablet traffic. I would of posted sooner to the MPB site but I was busy doing negative bid adjustments in a few hundred AdWords campaigns for myself and clients.
How to Negative Bid Adjust in AdWords
You follow the exact same process as you would for Mobile bid adjusting.
Log into Adwords and select the campaign you want to Bid adjust for. Now select settings and go to the device tab
In the bid adj. Column move down to the tablets with full browsers section and from there click the — and either choose increase or decrease from the drop down menu. You can set the value to bid adjust however you want.
If you want zero tablet traffic you would set the bid adjust to Negative 100% as in the example below
Now you would just click the save button and NO MORE TABLET TRAFFIC!!!!!!!! 🙂
For many people out there you will find that tablet traffic converts. People use tablets all the time and in South America for instance many use tablets to make purchases on because they do not own a desktop computer.
If you have had past sales on tablet traffic I would not cut it off 100%. Adjust the bid to help put in you the range of your CPA goal. This might mean a negative 50% bid adjust or along those lines.
Their are some clients of mine who do very well with tablet traffic. I can’t see any currently that need a increase in the bid adjust but there are those who I won’t apply a negative bid adjust on. For the other 80% this is a big win and great that you now have the ability to take more control of the traffic you are getting.
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I was scratching my head over the unrelated clicks from weird domains and apps from the mobile and tablet in my display campaigns. I though of creating a huge list of website which contains irrelevant sites and mobile apps. But this negative bidding is handy and easy to implement.