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What are Meta Ads Bid Multipliers?

How to use bid multipliers to maximize efficiency.

What are Meta Ads Bid Multipliers?

Bid Multipliers are a hidden Meta Ads feature that enables advertisers to activate nuanced bidding strategies within a single ad set. With Bid Multipliers, an advertiser can avoid segmentation and maintain one targeted audience while controlling their bid for targeting options such as demographics, placements, audiences, and many more.

How Meta Ads Bid Multipliers work:

Bid Multipliers range from 1 to .09 – or 100% to 9% – and work by bringing down an advertiser’s bid for undesired targeting options. Without bid multipliers, all targeting options use 100% of the auction bid. However, with a bid multiplier, the advertiser can penalize their bid for specific targeting options, such as age groups, to limit the number of times the ad wins in the auction, diverting impressions and ad spend towards the undesired age group.

The advertiser can penalize their bid for specific targeting options to limit the number of times the ad wins in the auction diverting impressions and ad spend

In our 20% Text Rule Blog post we reviewed how the auction determines winning ads. As a refresher, Advertiser Bid is part of a formula that calculates “Total Value” across the auction to determine the winning ad for a user impression.

When to use Meta Ads Bid Multipliers:

Let’s review an example of when an advertiser may consider using bid multipliers – A brand’s analytics team confirms increased conversion rates from desktop website traffic than mobile.

Without Bid Multiplies, the marketing team would need to segment their audiences into Desktop vs. Mobile to control the daily spend budget and ensure more spend was allocated towards Desktop users. However, the segmentation would split their performance signal across multiple ad sets and consequently counteract the expected lift in performance.

With Bid Multipliers, the marketing team can adjust the bid for device targeting and allow a more favorable bid for Desktop users – all while preserving conversion signal within a single ad set.

It is important to note: Bid Multipliers are not a bullet-proof option to improve performance. Meta’s ad auction algorithm automatically seeks the most favorable ad impressions to deliver desired conversions, so a bid multiplier may negatively impact performance as it limits the algorithm’s fluidity to find the most favorable impressions for your ads.

We recommend a conservative approach to Bid Multipliers – 

  • Limiting Bid Multipliers to instances that are backed by internal analytics.
  • Activating bid multipliers when facing business challenges that may only be solved through audience segmentation (i.e. limited inventory for specific age groups or genders, shipping delays for certain regions, a website that is not mobile-friendly)
  • Easing into bid multipliers with an adjustment that is closer to business-as-usual (100% or 1) and working down to (9% or .09)

How to activate Meta Ads Bid Multipliers:

StitcherAds has released Bid Multipliers as an alpha for brands to test – reach out to us if you want to participate in the alpha.

While we’re excited to release Meta Ads Bid multipliers, they are not a bullet-proof method to solving performance concerns or other business challenges. Please discuss with your client success manager if bid multipliers are a viable option for your campaigns.

Available options for improving performance or operational efficiency include:

  • Scheduled Designs: Adjust creative messaging without triggering the learning phase. 
  • Feed Management Services: Our data team is an extension of brand teams with the ability to enhance product feeds – adding additional data points not currently available, or limiting product selection to ensure ad spend is not wasted on low-performing products. Read our blog on inventory/feed management.
  • Third-Party Stats: Our TPS system allows brands to connect Google Analytics or Adobe Analytics to their ad account for greater clarity on performance.
  • Performance Product Sets: Connect Google Analytics to product sets for automatic product curation based on performance. This feature is currently in beta – please reach out to your client success manager for more information.