How Analytics Improves Google Ads Device Targeting

Imagine you sell mobile phone accessories, and wish to show ads to people who own a specific type of mobile device. In Google Ads, you can create an ad that focuses on that device. This is known as device targeting or device model targeting.

However, with so many devices on the market, it’s easy to show your ads on the wrong ones, which results in a flood of irrelevant traffic and wasted spend.

So, how do you determine what works for a specific device in your marketing funnel, and what doesn’t?

Before we delve into the logistics of analysis, it’s essential first to understand how a proper marketing funnel functions.

Key Stages of the Buyer’s Journey: Device Targeting Preparation

The marketing funnel predicts the buyer’s journey and also incorporates its key stages: awareness, consideration, and decision.

Let’s take a closer look at each of these stages to gain a clearer understanding of your marketing funnel and the buyer’s journey.

1. Awareness – In the first stage of every advertising campaign, the objective is to develop brand recognition among audiences, and gauge your campaign process. At this stage, you must also measure your campaign’s clicks, impressions, and engagements.
2. Consideration – The next stage is where you can switch your focus from creating brand awareness to generating leads. This involves developing relevant and engaging content to encourage your audience to purchase the products or services you’re offering. Here, you must consider your clickthroughs and engagements.
3. Decision – This is the final goal of every ad campaign as it deals with conversions — the action you have defined as valuable to your business. You can use reports to analyze the conversions and costs of different device types.

Make sure you measure the device performance during each stage of your customer’s journey. This will help you determine whether the device is working correctly for a specific campaign.

Awareness Stage: Device Analysis

The awareness stage is located at the top of the funnel, where you’re investing in brand awareness. At this stage, it’s vital to identify what device your target audience is using the most. For instance, if you’re marketing a desktop-based item, it makes the most sense to create the ad delivery to reach your desktop users.

Here are some metrics to measure for device targeting during the awareness stage:

1. Impression share – Identify the device that is generating the majority of your impression shares based on search volume.
2. Top impression percentage – This metric tells you how many of your impressions were in the top positions above the fold on the search engine result pages (SERPs).
3. Absolute top impression percentage – This shows what percentage of your total impression share is from when your ad was in the very top position in SERPs, and it also measures the quality of the impressions as well.
4. Lost IS (Lost Impression Share) – Identify how many potential impressions you are losing on various devices.
5. Impressions breakdown by device – This tells you if you’re getting your impressions on the device you had bid on in your campaign. You can view impressions by categories, such as geographical location, hours of the day, and the days of the week. These breakdowns help you discover keywords that work well (or not so well) for your device.
6. Exact match impression share (EMIS) – This will help you better understand your audience by the device they are using. You can analyze the EMIS by keyword match type, and conduct a historical analysis of the EMIS to identify meaningful patterns.
7. Which hour of the day is best/worst – This is in respect to EMIS for your device.

Actionable Decisions:

1. Pinpointing the best combination of geographical location, the hour of the day and day of the week for a specific device will give you the perfect candidate for your bid increase. By conducting a thorough historical analysis for two weeks, you’ll notice patterns that will guide your decision-making.
2. Find the worst combination and mark it for a bid reduction. Again, a historical analysis will show you patterns to help make this decision.
3. If the device type is irrelevant, stop bidding on it. For instance, if you’re displaying your ad on mobiles, but your landing page isn’t optimized for mobile yet, you’ll see a lot of bounces.
4. Search queries that match perfectly with your keywords may serve as good candidates for your new keywords.

Consideration Stage: Device Analysis

Here are some vital device targeting metrics to measure when you’re device analysis point of your marketing funnel. This stage correlates with the consideration stage of the customer journey.

1. Clicks – This measures which devices are generating the most clicks. You can determine if the click data develops a pattern, and identify which geographical location, time of day, and the day of the week are the best and worst for getting ad clicks. Also, you can determine which ad positions gain the most clicks,
2. Cost – This metric shows which device yields cheaper clicks. It also analyzes the impact of match types, hours of the day, day of the week, geo-location, and keywords to pinpoint the most cost-effective combinations for specific devices.
3. Wasted spend – This shows which device and dimension combinations are wasting the most amount of your campaign budget.

Actionable Decisions

1. Bid high on devices that are generating cheap clicks and not causing wasted spend.
2. Remove geographical locations that are generating expensive clicks/causing waste.
3. Reduce hour of the day (HOD) and day of the week (DOW) bids that are generating expensive clicks and wasted spend.
4. Increase bids on keywords that are attracting cheaper clicks based on your historical analysis research. Reduce bids on expensive/wasteful keywords.
5. Measure any invalid clicks and stop fraudulent ad clicks.

Decision Stage: Device Analysis

Here are some critical device targeting metrics to measure when you’re at the decision stage or device analysis point of your marketing funnel and customer journey.

1. Conversion – This measures which devices are generating conversion, and which geographical location, keywords, and match type work best for the specific device.
2. Cost per conversion – To understand which device is generating cheaper conversions.
3. Conversion Rate – To identify devices generating good conversion rates, and poor conversion rates at GEO, HOD, and DOW.
4. Return on Advertising Spend – This helps you determine which devices generate the best return on your investment. It considers keywords, geo-locations, and peak times, and days. You can use it to identify opportunities for profit for each device, and also to learn about pitfalls to avoid.

Actionable Decisions

1. Bid higher on profitable devices, Geo-locations, and DOW
2. Bid higher on profitable keywords
3. Focus on conversion rate optimization for devices lacking in profitability.

5 Benefits of a Device Performance Report

It is essential to your ad campaign to understand the performance trends of each device. Choosing to use a device performance report comes with many benefits:

1. Performance Indicators – the color of this marker indicates performance comparisons of metrics taken over a specific time. While red indicates lowered performance, green suggests an improvement.
2. Graphical Representation – this provides information on performance trends across specific parameters.
3. Historical and Current Data comparison – This determines what has changed over a certain amount of time, which is necessary for tracking performance trends.
4. Improved Device Targeting – Using insights for the day, time, and daily trend charts can help pinpoint the setup and settings that work best for your ad.
5. Segmented Analysis – PPCexpo reports offer a segmented analysis of each phase. The Device Performance report is designed to measure three campaign segments to simplify the complexities of PPC performance measurement. Therefore, this report can assist you in creating your most accurate and successful campaign yet.

Wrap Up

So, there you have it. Device targeting can be confusing at first, but when you get acquainted, it can take your PPC advertising game to the next level.

Try experimenting with different settings, and embrace the analysis side of things to learn more about reaching your audience on each device.

Exploit PPCexpo device performance report to measure how your Google Ads account is performing on different devices.