How to Exclude Mobile Devices From Google Ads Campaigns and Down Weight Mobile On PMAX
The “business intelligence” team tell the marketing department that mobile users who convert are less valuable to the business than Desktop Users.
“Mobile users are less valuable to the business than Desktop Users.”
Marketing goes and tries to up-weight budgets to desktop by reducing mobile ad spend and exposure through bid adjustments and notice:
It’s not possible to down weight bidding on Search campaigns when using tROAS or tCPA. The only option is to exclude mobile by setting it to -100%
It may be possible to select say, -50% but this is ignored by these bid strategies
There is no option to down weight mobile on Performance Max campaigns at all as this feature is not available
Reluctantly, Google provided a compromised feature to limit ad exposure to mobile through the Conversion Value Rules setting…
Conversion Value Rules in Google Ads
Conversion value rules allow marketing to override the best efforts of Google’s automated Smart bid strategies based on its own business intelligence. The 3 ways this can be done is by:
device
location
audience
These can be adjusted up or down by a specific amount (plus or minus) or by a multiplication factor.
Beyond reducing spend on mobile, this is also a practical way to signal to Google that certain audiences are less worthy and this is essential data to share for lead generation companies
How to Block Mobile from PMax Campaigns
So, it’s not actually possible to exclude mobile from Performance Max campaigns but the bid strategy can down-weight the influence of users who convert on mobile by multiplying the conversion value of mobile devices by 0.5 which is the same as reducing its value by a half! Over time, the smart bid strategy will learn to prioritse desktop over mobile and that’s the best you can do.
A more drastic approach which would stop all YouTube advertising and reduce mobile is to completely remove all Ad Assets from any Asset Groups (for shopping campaigns). This turns the PMax campaign type into a standard shopping campaign with benefits, as signals do still work and can be used to help steer the campaign in addition to the product feed.
Ad Assets to remove:
Images
Videos
Logos
Headlines
Descriptions
How to Reduce Mobile Bidding on Google ADs?
Use conversion value rules
The setting to do this can be found in “Tools & Settings” > Conversions > Value Rules (left hand menu)
It is available at account or MCC level so it can be set across all campaign types (including Performance Max) across all accounts
Specifically for Performance Max, it can also be set at campaign level within the campaign level settings for each Performance Max Campaign
See also, this link on How to Block Mobile Apps from Display Ad Campaigns
