What Should I Do for Max Increase/Decrease Limits?

The Max Increase/Decrease limits for bids and placements can be adjusted to achieve your desired outcome.

If doing large scale optimizations (i.e., large quantity of keywords that account for >30% of total ad spend) it’s best to use smaller limits to avoid any drastic outcomes.

For smaller adjustments (i.e., just a few keywords, less than 10% of total ad spend) you may want to use larger limits to achieve the desired outcome for those optimizations more quickly.

Below are some general recommendations; however, every account is unique, and therefore these should be adjusted based on additional context and “big picture” goals for the account.

Balanced Optimizations

For routine maintenance optimizations, we recommend keeping the optimizer’s default settings:

• Bid Adjustments

  • Max Increase: +25%

  • Max Decrease: -25%

• Placement Adjustments

  • Max Increase: +33%

  • Max Decrease: -33%

Optimizations to Reduce ACOS

When it’s imperative to quickly reduce ACOS, we recommend turning OFF the max decrease settings:

• Bid Adjustments

  • Max Increase: +25%

  • Max Decrease: OFF

• Placement Adjustments

  • Max Increase: +33%

  • Max Decrease: OFF

Optimizations to Increase Sales

When growing sales is more important than ACOS, we recommend increasing the max increase limits accordingly:

• Bid Adjustments

  • Max Increase: +50%

  • Max Decrease: -25%

• Placement Adjustments

  • Max Increase: +100%

  • Max Decrease: -33%

Of course, all of these recommendations are generalizations and should not be followed rigidly.

The best PPC performance is achieved when optimizer settings are uniquely adjusted for specific trends.

Stephen Noch’s Recommendation (for Advanced Users)

I frequently like to turn off all limits so that I can see the “true” calculations for every placement and keyword.

Then, in the Preview Optimizations window, I can review and manually edit or adjust the limits as I see fit.

There may be some keyword bids that need to drop by -90% because they’re clearly underperforming and not super relevant. And yet, there may be some other highly relevant keywords with a lot of volume and high ACOS that I don’t want to lose out on (so I might only allow a -25% decrease).