GOOGLE ADWORDS BIDDING STRATEGY

Google Adwords bidding strategy:

Manually set bids at the ad group level, for individual keywords, or for ad placements, so you know you’re bidding for most important clicks. With automated bidding, you can set a daily budget and then have AdWords automatically adjust your bids to get the most clicks or conversions possible within your budget. Three tools to use for CPC bids:

1. Bid simulator runs “what-if” scenarios

2. Keyword Planner How often keywords get searched and cost estimate.

3. The first-page bid estimates Needed bid to be on the first page of Google search results.

Once you’ve identified which keywords, locations, times, and devices are getting good results, you can adjust your bids accordingly. For instance, if a keyword has a low average CPC but each click converts well, you may try increasing its max CPC bid. This could improve the ad’s average position for that keyword, giving your ads more exposure and potentially increase your ROI. If you want to drive visits to your website, focus on clicks and use CPC bidding. Determine a competitive bid for each keyword by using a tool like the Keyword Planner.

Decide to spend on clicks, impressions, and video views. You set maximum bids. To drive sales, use a bid strategy for increasing clicks and conversions, but if you want to increase views of your video ad, you can use a strategy that focuses on increasing video views. Use manual bidding when running AdWords with a small advertising budget, you want more budget control, and are reworking an underperforming campaign.

Goals:

1. Ad reach: Manual cost-per-click (CPC) Bid to increase clicks with manual CPC, enter the max you’re willing to pay for a click on your ad. (You may pay less, the auction decides).

2. Ad engagement: Cost-per-view (CPV) Bid to increase video views with CPV, set the max you’re willing to pay for video views and other video interactions.

3. Ad clicks and conversions: Viewable-cost-per-impression (vCPM): Bid to increase impressions. For an impression to be “viewable,” at least 50 percent of your ad must show for at least one second for display ads and at least two seconds for video ads).

4. Ad views: Cost-per-engagement (CPE) Bid to increase lightbox expansions or interactions with pre-expanded ads.

Use conversion tracking or Google Analytics for monitoring to make informed bids. Decide bid amounts with the CPC column in your AdWords account to determine your starting bids. Use the Keyword Planner) to Determine a bid strategy based on your goals.

Automated Bidding

Improve performance in Ad auctions with your bids to account for auction-time changes in device, browser, location, and more. Your keyword list determines which searches and site visits can trigger your winning bid ad. Right bid for an impression and is influenced by match type, device, and location. With automated bidding, AdWords can automatically increase bids for impressions that it predicts (from auction-time data) could be more successful. Good for additional awareness, clicks, and offers conversion-based strategies that help you drive more acquisitions. Use automated bidding if you have conversion tracking or Google Analytics, AdWords certified, Campaign has sufficient click and conversion data for the algorithm to operate, managing campaigns at scale, have had 50-100 conversions over 30 days in a single campaign

• Optimizing an existing campaign

Goals:

1. 1. Ad conversions – Maximize clicks automatically set bids to get as many clicks as possible in your budget to increase site visits and increase clicks on low-traffic terms.

1. 1. Ad visibility – Target search page location automatically sets your bids to help increase the chances that your ads appear at the top of the page or on the first page of search results. Target outranking share automatically sets your bid to outrank other domains in search results pages.

1. 1. Ad clicks – Target cost-per-acquisition (CPA) automatically sets bids to help get as many conversions as possible at the target CPA you set. Enhanced cost-per-click (ECPC) automatically adjusts your manual bids to try to maximize conversions.

1. Ad revenue – Target return on ad spend (ROAS) bids more where AdWords estimates ads are more likely to lead to a sale.

Make sure to consolidate your ad groups, create early conversions, and avoid frequent changes to bidding options.

Bid adjustments available

1. Mobile – Searches that occur on mobile devices. When promoting appraise bids for mobile users to focus on driving app installs.

2. Location – Certain countries, cities, or other geographic areas. For example, if you own a restaurant, you could raise bids to show your ads more frequently to people nearby.

3. Time of day – Increase or decrease your bids on certain days or during certain hours. For example, meal delivery service (Denver Fastfood/ Uber Eats), you could raise your bids from 5-7pm to increase your chances of showing ads to hungry commuters headed home.

4. Top content – Popular content to increase your ad’s chance of showing on top content on YouTube and the Display Network. When your ad is eligible to appear on this content, AdWords will use your bid adjustment to raise your bid. For example, you could raise your bids for the hottest new cat video on YouTube. *Top content adjustments are recommended for advanced users.

5. Targeting methods – Use bid adjustments for topics, placements, and other targeting methods in campaign types that show ads on the Display Network. For example, if you sell luggage, you could increase your bids on travel sites in the Display Network so you’re more likely to show on travel blogs and review sites.

6. Remarketing lists for search ads – Show ads to these people on these lists. For example, you could increase your bid for those who previously viewed your website in the last 30 days. *Remarketing list adjustments are recommended for advanced users.

• Add or remove a bid adjustment

• About bid adjustments

Setting your budget

1. Calculate based on your monthly budget – per day by dividing your monthly budget by 30.4 – the average number of days per month. For example, $1,450 per month on advertising / 30.4 days = daily budget of $48. Due to changes in traffic, AdWords allows up to 20% more clicks in a day than a specified budget. However, in a month, Adwords doesn’t charge the average daily budget amount multiplied by 30.4.

2. Calculate based on your average cost-per-click. You can choose a daily budget for each campaign based on your advertising goals. For example, let’s say your cost-per-click is $0.10 on average, and you’d like around 500 clicks per day. You might budget $50 per day. Daily budget: $0.10 x 500 = $50 per day (cost-per-click x clicks per day = Daily budget).

3. Find your campaign’s recommended budget – See daily budget but have the potential to earn more clicks and impressions. Criteria include: Recent campaign performance, * Current campaign budget, * Keyword list, * Campaign targeting settings

4. Check your ad delivery method – When your average daily budget is reached, ads stop showing for that day; determines how quickly your ads are shown and how long your budget lasts during a given day in the daily budget. ”Standard” delivery method – spreads your budget throughout the day. The “Accelerated” uses your budget more quickly.

Note: AdWords won’t display a recommended daily budget if you rarely meet your daily budget, or if your campaign has limited data. If you don’t see a recommended budget.

1. Build awareness – requires a larger budget due to the longer path to conversion.

2. Influence consideration –  mid-funnel and can be accomplished with a small, medium, and large ad budget. 

3. Driving action – At the bottom of the marketing funnel where you typically have a small group of your target audience. You can meet all of your activity goals with a small, medium, or large daily budget.

Set a budget for your campaign

Using Google tools to help you decide CPC bids

• Bid Simulator runs “what-if” scenarios like, “How many more impressions would I have gotten if my bid had been $0.10 higher last week?”

• Keyword Planner shows you how often some keywords get searched, and gives you cost estimates at a glance.

• First-page bid estimates helps you see how much you may need to bid to put your ad on the first page of Google search results.

How is ECPC different from Target CPA?

Both ECPC and Target CPA work to get you more conversions. Target CPA needs no max. CPC, though it does require you to set a target CPA. Target CPA gives you the very best chance to improve your results, but ECPC provides a level of control and comfort that some people prefer.

Both ECPC and Target CPA

Use conversion tracking or Google Analytics data from your account to predict a conversion rate for each auction. Adjust your bids to help you win the most promising clicks.

1. ECPC – Works with all your campaign settings and max CPC bids, Can raise your max CPC bids by up to 30 percent, and Works with third-party bidding systems.
2. Target CPA – based on a target CPA you set, Has the full freedom to set your CPC bid for each auction, and May does not work with some API-based bid management solutions.

The Include in “Conversions” setting lets you decide whether or not to include individual conversion actions in your “Conversions” reporting column. The data in this column is used by bid strategies like target CPA, target ROAS, and ECPC, so your bid strategy will only optimize based on the conversions that you’ve chosen to include. The Include cross-device conversions setting lets you include cross-device conversions in your “Conversions” column and in your conversion-based bid strategies.

Types of Bid Adjustments

1. Device: show your ad more or less frequently for searches that occur on specific devices: computers, tablets, or mobile devices; Where you can use them: Campaigns, Ad groups. If you’ve set a device bid adjustment for a campaign and an ad group within that campaign, the ad group bid adjustment will be used to determine your bid.
2. Location: show your ad more or less frequently to customers in certain countries, cities, or other geographic areas. You can also use location extension targeting to set different bids for customers who are located around your business.
3. Ad Scheduling: increase or decrease your bids for campaigns that show only on certain days or during certain hours. To do this, you’ll first need to set up a custom ad schedule. You can use them in campaigns.  Range is -90% to +900%
4. On YouTube and the Display Network, you can set bid adjustments for content that has been measured by our system to be more popular, tends to have a greater number of impressions per day, and gets a higher level of traffic and viewer engagement. When your ad is eligible to appear on this content, AdWords will use your bid adjustment to raise your bid. You can bid on content on YouTube or the Google Display Network of apps and websites. You can use them in ad groups in the range of 0% to +500%.
5. Targeting methods (advanced): Set bid adjustments for topics, placements, and other targeting methods in campaign types that show ads on the Display Network. Learn how to add audiences (interests and remarketing lists) to an ad group. You can use them in ad groups with a range of -90% to +900%.
6. Remarketing lists for search ads: You can set bid adjustments for remarketing lists in your ad groups if you’d like to show ads to people on these lists. For example, you could increase your bid by 25% for those who previously viewed your website in the last 30 days. If you don’t yet have a remarketing list set up, read about AdWords remarketing lists for search ads. You can use them in ad groups with the range of -90% to +900%.

Bid adjustment eligibility

Campaign type	Device	Location	Ad scheduling	Top content (Display Network, YouTube)	Targeting method (Display Network)	Remarketing lists for search ads (Search Network)
Search Network only: Standard	Yes	No	No	No	No	No
Search Network only (All features)	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	No	Yes
Display Network only (All features)	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Display Network only (Mobile apps)	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Display Network only (Remarketing, Engagement)	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Search Network with Display Select: Standard	Yes	No	No	No	No	No
Search Network with Display Select: All features	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	Yes
Shopping	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	No	No
Video	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	No

Automated Bidding

• If your campaign is using an automated bid strategy other than Maximize Clicks, it’s not possible to set ad scheduling bid adjustments.
• For Target CPA and Target ROAS bid strategies, the only device bid adjustment that can be used is a decrease of 100%.

Multiple bid adjustments

When you set more than one bid adjustment in your campaign, those adjustments are typically multiplied together to determine how much your bid will increase or decrease. However, multiple device and location bid adjustments behave differently. Keep in mind that combined bid adjustments cannot exceed a 900% bid increase. For example, a $1 bid with a device increase of 900% combined with a location increase of 900% will result in a bid of only $10.

Multiple device bid adjustments

If you set a device bid adjustment at the campaign level and an adjustment for the same device at the ad group level, the ad group device bid adjustment will be used to determine the resulting bid adjustment. However, if the campaign-level device bid adjustment is a 100% decrease, then the ad group level device bid adjustment won’t be used.

Multiple location bid adjustments

Multiple adjustments that apply to the same location won’t be combined.

Multiple Display Network content bid adjustments

For Display campaigns, you can set bid adjustments at the ad group level on a specific targeting method in the Display tab, as well as on Top content in the Settings tab. This means that when your ad is eligible to appear on a specific placement that also qualifies as top content, AdWords could use two bid adjustments. One bid adjustment could be based on a specific targeting method, such as topic, and the second could be set for top content. Learn more about Display Network bidding

Example

Say you’re running a campaign that targets the U.S. and is scheduled to run all days of the week. And, you’ve set an ad group max CPC bid of US$1. You decide to increase your bid by 20% for California and decrease your bid by 50% for Saturday. Your resulting bid for a search that occurs in California on a Saturday will be US$0.60. Here’s the math:

Starting bid: $1

California adjustment: $1 + ($1 x 20%) = $1.20

Saturday adjustment: $1.20 + ($1.20 x -50%) = $0.60

Resulting bid for searches in California on Saturday: $0.60

Resulting bid for searches in California on Sunday through Friday: $1.20

Resulting bid for searches in other states on Saturday: $0.50

Resulting bid for searches in other states on Sunday through Friday: $1.00

The power of AdWords Smart Bidding

Smart Bidding is a set of conversion-based bid strategies—Target CPA, Target ROAS, and Enhanced CPC—that uses advanced machine learning to help you tailor the right bid to each and every auction. It factors in a wide range of auction-time signals including device, location, time of day, remarketing list, language, and operating system to capture the unique context of every search.

If you don’t yet know what type of automated bid strategy is right for you, read About automated bidding first. Before you can set up a Target CPA bid strategy, you’ll need to set up conversion tracking. To maximize results and give machine learning algorithms enough data to make informed bidding decisions, we recommend that you have at least 30 conversions in the past 30 days. It also helps if your ad group or campaign has received conversions at a similar rate for at least a few days.

About target return on ad spend.

“Standard” delivery (default option)

Aims to evenly distribute your budget across the entire day (12 a.m. – 11:59 p.m.) to avoid exhausting your budget early on.

“Accelerated” delivery (not recommended for most advertisers)

Accelerated delivery is optimized less. It spends your budget more quickly, usually at the start of the day (i.e., 12:00 am). Because of this, accelerated delivery isn’t recommended for most advertisers. So if your campaign is limited by budget, your campaign may exhaust its average daily budget early in the day, causing your ad to stop showing for most of the day. Though not recommended for most advertisers, you can use this method if it’s important to you that your ads start showing in the morning and more quickly thereafter, until your average daily budget is reached — even if that means they might not show throughout the entire day. If your campaign is limited by budget, your ads will stop showing once you’ve reached the average daily budget allocated for that day. If you reach your budget limit early in the morning, your ad won’t run again until the next day, so you might not see your ad appear every time you look for it, particularly at night.

You have four options for ad rotation:

1. Optimize for clicks (default): Ads expected to attract more clicks are delivered more often into the ad auction than other ads in the ad group. These higher-quality ads gain more impressions than other ads in the ad group, resulting in higher ad-served percentages.
2. Optimize for conversions: Ads expected to provide more conversions are delivered more often into the ad auction than other ads in the ad group. Although this option may result in your ad group receiving fewer clicks than the previous option, it’s more likely to receive more conversions, which can result in an improved return on investment.
3. Rotate evenly: Delivers your ads more evenly into the ad auction. Allows ads with lower clickthrough rates and conversion rates to show more often, so this option could result in a lower average position or fewer clicks and conversions.
4. Rotate indefinitely: Similar to the “Rotate evenly” setting, this option delivers your ads more evenly into the ad auction, but does so for an indefinite amount of time and does not optimize. This option is not recommended for most advertisers.

Setting a frequency cap on impressions for Display Network Ads

Frequency capping limits the number of times your ads appear to the same unique user on the Google Display Network. It doesn’t apply to the Search Network. Only impressions that were viewable count towards frequency caps.  An ad is counted as viewable when 50% or more of the ad shows for one second or longer for display ads and two seconds or longer for video ads. If you turn on frequency capping for a campaign, you specify a limit for the number of impressions you’ll allow per day, per week, or per month for an individual user. You also choose whether the cap applies to each ad, ad group, or campaign. If you’re advertising on websites that see a lot of repeat visitors (like The New York Times), this helps you avoid showing your ad too much to the same folks.