Different Ad Bidding Strategies

Google Ads offer several bidding strategies that are designed to enhance different types of campaigns. Depending on which target market you want to impress, and whether your attention focuses on getting clicks, impressions or views you can easily determine which strategy is most suitable. In the article below , we’ll describe how to use your advertising goals to choose the right  bidding  strategy.

Strategy 1: Manual Cost Per Click (CPC)

Manual cost per click allows you to set bids at either the ad group or keyword level. Setting individual bids at the keyword level allows for the highest level of control. This gives the same bid to all the keywords or placements within the ad group.

Important Note: Keyword level bids dominate ad group level bids.

Manual Cost Per Click (CPC) is usually the best bidding strategy for new advertisers. It allows the user to  keep a close eye on performance and make sure that none of the ads are exceeding the set budget.

Strategy 2: Automatic Cost Per Click (CPC)

Automatic cost per click gives Google access to change the users’ bids up or down. This helps by giving the user most clicks within their daily budget for that specific campaign. Automatic cost per click is a decent bidding strategy if you need to drastically reduce budgets and do not want to lose impression share quick. Some of the major disadvantages to this bidding strategy include that it does not allow you to set max CPC bids at the individual keyword level, if some keywords are performing better than others, you’d have to increase those specific bids. But if you use automated bidding, you won’t have that level of control. Another major concern to remember is that your goal or aim for this strategy isn’t clicks, it’s conversions. You can give it a shot to test with it may or may not working out for you.

Strategy 3: Enhanced Cost Per Click (ECPC)

Enhanced CPC (ECPC) gives Google the free will to increase or decrease the users bids by at least 30%. Google tells us that they use historical conversion data and their algorithms to predict which searchers are more likely to lead to a conversion and which searches are not. In the event that a conversion is possible to take place, Google will increase your max CPC bid by up to 30% and does the opposite for conversions that are less likely to occur. Google states that “ECPC can help you get more conversions while keeping or reducing your cost per conversion.” If curiosity arises, its best to try it on a smaller campaign at first. It’s always  safer to  measure the cost per conversion, conversion rate, and conversion volume as an apples-to-apples comparison before heading out to a large campaign .

Sometimes this is a default bid setting when creating new campaigns, so make sure to check settings  if you don’t want to use during the ad campaign.

Strategy 4: CPA Bidding (Conversion Optimizer)

Known as conversion optimizer, CPA bidding allows Google to set bids to average a certain cost per conversion goal that you’ve set. Based on the history of your Google Ads account and conversion volumes, CPA bidding needs at least 15 conversions over a span of 30 days to become active. If you meet the above criteria, the CPA bidding can only be held back by budget caps that you might have. Some say the CPA bidding is much more effective on the Google Ads Display Network, where a lot more factors are responsible compared to the Google Ads Search Network. In simpler terms keyword intent can be very obvious and lead to a conversion. As with all Google Ads bidding strategies, always record pre-performance and compare it with post-performance after you set a new bidding strategy.

Strategy 5: CPM Bidding (Cost Per Thousand Impression)

CPM Bidding is only available for Display network campaigns for example remarketing, CPM bidding allows you to set target bids that accumulate after 1,000 impressions. Google at one point of time allowed max CPM bidding, but has changed recently to what’s called Viewable Cost Per Thousand Impression bidding (vCPM). CPM bidding does not charge you for clicks. But it will charge you for impressions of your ads, even if they’re shown below other ads where a user won’t see them after search engine is used.

Strategy 6: Flexible bid strategies

Flexible bid strategies automatically set bids to optimize for certain goals across set campaigns, ad groups and keywords. Once you have created a strategy, it will be shared in your Shared Library in Google Ads (formerly known as Google AdWords), making it accessible from one spot and making performance tracking easier. You can then make use of the strategy on the campaign, ad group or keyword level from each respective tab.

There are many more ad bidding strategies but these are the most common and effective strategies that are used to benefit the user at ease and show produce quick results.