Bidding & Budgets
Bid Modifiers (Bid Adjustments)
Bid modifiers are percentage adjustments applied to bids for specific dimensions such as device, location, ad schedule, audience, or demographic, raising or lowering what you pay in those segments.
In practice
A +20 percent device modifier on mobile tells Google to bid a fifth more when the searcher is on a phone; a -100 percent modifier excludes the segment entirely. Modifiers exist for device, location, time, audiences in observation, age, gender, household income, and, on some campaign types, call and interaction types.
Under manual and enhanced CPC they act directly on the bid. Under Target CPA and Target ROAS, most modifiers are ignored because the algorithm already accounts for those signals; device modifiers act as constraints, and -100 percent exclusions always hold. That does not make them pointless. Audience and demographic modifiers under Smart Bidding still tell the system what you value and are a cheap way to shape delivery.
We set modifiers from data, not instinct: a segment earns an adjustment when it shows a sustained difference from the campaign average over a meaningful window, and every adjustment is logged so it can be reversed.
Why it matters
They are the most granular manual control left in an automated bidding world.
RELATED TERMS
Dayparting
Dayparting is scheduling ads to run, or bidding differently, during specific hours of the day and days of the week based on when conversions actually happen.
Smart Bidding
Smart Bidding is Google's set of automated, conversion-based bid strategies (Target CPA, Target ROAS, Maximize Conversions, Maximize Conversion Value) that set auction-time bids using machine learning signals.
Location Exclusions
Location exclusions are geographic areas, from countries down to cities and postal codes, where a campaign is prevented from showing ads even if they fall inside a broader targeted region.
Written by Ilya Bulychev, Founder, Live PPC Ads. Part of the PPC Glossary.
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