Choosing a bid strategy for AdWords campaigns can be a complicated process, but it is essential for the success of your advertising efforts. Your bid strategy will determine how much you pay for each click or impression on your ads and ultimately affect your ad's reach and performance.
Firstly, it is important to understand the different types of bid strategies available, such as manual CPC, automated bidding, and target CPA. Each of these strategies has its advantages and disadvantages, and the best approach will depend on your advertising goals, budget, and the nature of your business.
Secondly, you need to consider the data available to you and how you will use it to optimize your bids. AdWords provides valuable information about your ad's performance, such as click-through rates, conversion rates, and cost per acquisition. You can use this data to adjust your bids and improve your ROI.
Lastly, you should regularly monitor and adjust your bid strategy to ensure it aligns with your advertising goals and stays competitive in the marketplace. This may involve testing different approaches, experimenting with different bid amounts, and analyzing the results to refine your strategy continually.
Here are a few tips to help you determine the best bid strategy for your Google AdWords campaign.
Determine your campaign goals: Before you can choose a bid strategy, you need to understand what you want to achieve with your campaign. Are you looking to increase brand awareness, generate leads, or drive sales? Once you have a clear idea of your campaign goals, you can choose a bid strategy that aligns with those goals.
It's important to understand the various bidding strategies that are available on Google AdWords. These strategies include manual CPC, automatic CPC, target CPA, and target ROAS, each of which has its own set of benefits and drawbacks. Therefore, it is crucial to have a clear understanding of how each strategy works so that you can choose the one that best suits your campaign.
What is the goal of your Google Adwords Campaign?
Different types of campaigns and advertising goals require different bid strategies. There are four basic types of goals to consider when bidding in addition to your current campaign settings.
1.Conversions: If you want customers to take a specific action on your website and you're using conversion tracking. A conversion action is a specific customer action that you've defined as valuable to your business, such as an online purchase, fill out a form or phone call.
2. Clicks: If you want to drive traffic to your website, focusing on clicks is ideal. Cost-per-click (CPC) bidding is the best option for your campaign.
3.Visibility: If you want to increase brand awareness, focusing on impressions is the strategy for you. You can use cost-per-thousand viewable impressions (vCPM) bidding to get your message in front of customers.
4.Views: If you run video ads and want to increase views or interactions with your ads, you can use cost-per-view (CPV) or cost-per-thousand-impression (CPM) bidding. This also good for product and brand consideration.
As Warp & Woof caters to small businesses, we will exclusively focus on conversion and click goals. If you are a small business owner providing services or selling online, it is highly probable that brand awareness and views hold little significance for you. Your primary concern would be generating sales and providing services to your customers.
Goal to Focus on Conversions (for Search and Display ads)
A conversion is a specific action you want to occur on your website, such as a sale, schedule an appointment or email sign-up.
To enhance your conversions, you can use Smart Bidding, which eliminates much of the manual effort and guesswork involved in bid adjustments. Smart Bidding is an automated set of bid strategies that utilizes Google AI to optimize for conversions or conversion value in every auction, a feature called "auction-time bidding." Additionally, it takes into account a variety of auction-time cues, such as device, location, time of day, language, and operating system, to capture the unique context of each search. Here are some of the best Smart Bidding approaches that you can use:
Target Cost Per Action (CPA)
Maximize Conversions
Maximize Conversion Value
Target return on ad spend (ROAS)
Bid Strategies for Conversions:
Target cost per action (CPA): If you want to optimize for conversions, you can use Target CPA to help increase conversions while targeting a specific cost per action (CPA).
Target CPA bidding is a feature that allows you to set a target cost per action (CPA) for your Google Ads campaign. With this feature, Google Ads automatically finds the optimal bid for your ad each time it's eligible to appear by using historical information about your campaign and evaluating the contextual signals that are present at the time of the auction.
It's important to note that while Google Ads will try to keep your cost per conversion equal to the target CPA you set, some conversions may cost more than your target, and some may cost less. This is because your actual CPA depends on factors outside Google's control, such as changes to your website or ads or increased competition in ad auctions. Additionally, your actual conversion rate may be higher or lower than the predicted conversion rate.
For example, if you set a target CPA of $10 USD, Google Ads will automatically set your bids to try to get you as many conversions at $10 USD on average. To help improve your performance in every ad auction, this strategy adjusts bids using real-time signals like device, browser, location, time of day, remarketing list, and more.
Learn more About Target CPA bidding.
Maximize Conversions: If you want to optimize for conversions, but just want to spend your entire budget instead of targeting a specific CPA, you can use Maximize Conversions.
Maximize conversions uses Google's AI to set bids to help get the most conversions for your campaign while spending your budget.
Maximize Conversions bidding is a feature that uses historical data about your campaign along with contextual signals present at auction-time to determine the optimal bid for your ad each time it's eligible to appear. This feature employs advanced AI to optimize bids and also offers auction-time bidding capabilities, which helps tailor bids for every auction, allowing you to get the cheapest conversions available for your budget.
Learn more About Maximize Conversions bidding.
Maximize Conversion Value: If you want to optimize for conversion value but just want to spend your entire budget instead of targeting a specific ROAS, you can use Maximize Conversion Value. It does the same as maximize conversions but it may bid higher for auctions that would result in greater conversion value than auctions with lower conversion value.
Learn more About Maximize Conversion Value bidding.
Target return on ad spend (ROAS): If you want to optimize for conversion value, you can use Target ROAS to help increase conversion value while targeting a specific return on ad spend (ROAS).
This bidding strategy uses Google's artificial intelligence to analyze and predict the potential value of a conversion every time a user searches for the products or services you advertise. Based on this prediction, Google's AI adjusts your bids for these searches to maximize your return on investment.
In practice, if the bid strategy determines that a user's search is likely to generate a high-value conversion, the Target ROAS will bid high on that search. On the other hand, if the bid strategy determines that the search is unlikely to generate a high-value conversion, it will bid low. Google's AI optimizes your bids at auction time, so you can tailor your bids for each auction.
Learn more About Target ROAS bidding.
Goal to Focus on clicks with CPC bidding (For Search & Display ads)
If your main goal is to have people visit your website, then clicks are a good place to start. Using cost-per-click (CPC) bidding, you'll pay only when someone actually clicks on your ad and comes to your site.
Bid Strategies for CPC:
If you want to drive traffic to your website, there are two cost-per-click bid strategies you should consider.
Maximize Clicks
Manual CPC bidding
Maximize Clicks: This is an automated bid strategy. It's the simplest way to bid for clicks. All you have to do is set an average daily budget, and the Google Ads system automatically manages your bids to bring you the most clicks possible within your budget.
If you have an advertising budget that you'd like to spend without monitoring and updating individual CPC bids consistently, Maximize Clicks could be a good option for you. This feature automatically updates CPC bids and helps increase website traffic. It's also a good choice if you're new to Google Ads or don't know how to bid for particular keywords or placements.
However, Maximize Clicks may not be the right choice if you have specific advertising goals, such as maintaining a specific Ad Rank or cost per conversion. While you can set a maximum CPC bid for your entire campaign, you cannot set individual CPC bids.
Here's an example: If you have a website that sells roof supplies and your main goal is to bring more customers to your site, Maximize Clicks is a great option. You can set your overall advertising budget, and the feature will help you find the most customers based on that budget.
Learn more About Maximize Clicks bidding.
Manual CPC bidding: This lets you manage your maximum CPC bids yourself. You can set different bids for each ad group in your campaign, or for individual keywords or placements. If you've found that certain keywords or placements are more profitable, you can use manual bidding to allocate more of your advertising budget to those keywords or placements.
Manual CPC bidding allows you to adjust your maximum CPC bids in order to control the cost and volume of clicks on your ads. This bidding strategy is ideal if you want to control the maximum CPC bids for specific ad groups, keywords, or placements. Additionally, if your primary goal is to increase website traffic rather than brand awareness, and you don't require a target budget to be met every month, Manual CPC bidding is a good option for you. This strategy works for campaigns that target the Search Network, the Display Network, or both.
However, if you are unsure about which keywords or placements are most profitable, or if you don't have the time to manage manual bids, Maximize Clicks may be a better fit for you.
For example, if you sell a variety of roofing supplies on your website but are primarily focused on selling roof tiles, you can use Manual CPC bidding to set a higher bid for the keyword "roof tiles" in your ad group, while keeping lower bids for other keywords. This way, whenever the "roof tiles" keyword triggers your ad, your ad will appear with a higher bid, increasing the chances of getting more clicks.
Learn more About Manual CPC bidding.
After selecting a bid strategy, it is crucial to test and optimize your campaign to achieve the best possible results. Regularly monitor your campaign's performance and make necessary adjustments to improve your return on investment.
Ultimately, the key to maximizing your budget with Google is to carefully target your audience, track your results, and make adjustments as needed. With the right strategy and tools, even a modest budget can yield significant results.
In conclusion, while choosing a bid strategy for AdWords campaigns can be complex, taking the time to understand your options, analyze your data, and regularly optimize your approach can lead to improved ad performance and a higher return on investment.
Warp & Woof Agency specializes in social media marketing. Warp & Woof is a full-service, local Digital Marketing Ad Agency servicing Milton, Alpharetta, and the North Fulton area. We specialize:
Digital Marketing
Social Media Marketing
Website Design
SEM (Search Engine Marketing)
SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
Local SEO
Logos & Graphic Design
Content Creation & Content Marketing
Email Marketing
Branding
Website Management
Video Production
Account Management
Marketing Consulting
We can help you meet your business objectives by helping you figure out the best solutions for your small business. Call Patty Carter, Owner of Warp & Woof, for a Free Consultation at 678-471-8811 or contact us at www.warpandwoofagency.com.
Subscribe Below to Receive our Monthly Newsletter in 2024. It will be full of important information to build your small business.