6 Best Strategies for Google Adwords Keyword Bidding!

How much money should you spend to start your Google AdWords campaign ? This is a crucial question because Google’s automated advertising tools can put you at risk when you first start running your ads.

Start with manual bidding

Manual bidding is the best way to understand the effectiveness of your advertising efforts. We don’t recommend using Google’s various automated bidding settings right at the beginning unless you are very confident about the return on your bids. If not, start with the basics – review the bids yourself and adjust them manually.

Frankly speaking, unless Google has a ton of data, its automated bidding feature doesn’t “work.” In fact, you need to be able to achieve at least 50 conversions per month (on the campaign level) before you start using automated bidding.

How do I set my bid?

Advertising on the Google Display Network (GDN) can be a bit complicated. So for now, let's focus on search ads.

AdWords search ads offer two bidding options. The first (easier) option is to set bids at the ad group level; the second is to set bids at the keyword level. Bidding at the keyword level gives you more control, but it also requires more attention and management.

How much should I bid initially?

We recommend that you start with Google’s Keyword Planner tool. Enter your keywords and it will suggest a reasonable initial bid. If you disagree with Google's advice, you can start with $1 or $2 per click. Of course, this depends on your own budget and risk appetite. Whatever bid you use, it is just a starting point as you will be changing your bids frequently.

You can add three additional columns of data next to each keyword to guide your ad bids. You can find this data on the Keywords tab by clicking on the “Column Chooser” and then under “Attributes” add the following three additional columns: “Estimated First Page Bid,” “Estimated Top Page Bid,” and “Estimated First Position Bid.”

Different advertisers have different goals and optimization criteria. Our goal here is not to get more impressions, more clicks, or more video views, but to get conversions.

In your Adwords account’s Shared Library , you’ll find a section called “Bid Strategies,” where you’ll find six different bidding strategies:

1. Target cost per acquisition (CPA)

If you’re using conversion tracking (and you should be), you can choose this bidding strategy. It used to be called Google’s “Conversion Optimizer.” Using this strategy, Google will be able to maximize your conversion rate while still achieving your desired CPA. You set your target CPA amount at the campaign or ad group level; Google then decides when to show your ads, who to show them to, and how much to charge per click to reach your goal.

Tip: Use your CPA to adjust your total ad spend. If you want to reduce your traffic, don’t reduce your budget, instead, lower your CPA, which forces Google to work harder to find you cheaper leads or sales.

2. Enhanced cost per click (ECPC)

This is arguably the safest of the Google bidding strategies and a great place to start. Manually select your default bid, and Google will increase or decrease your bid based on its calculation of whether a click leads to a conversion.

Unlike a CPA strategy, ECPC automatically sets bids based on your target cost, whereas when optimizing for conversion rate, ECPC is limited by your maximum CPC bid.

3. Target return on ad spend (ROAS)

This is another option you have if you use conversion tracking. The purpose of this strategy is to achieve a target ROI. This means you want to look for conversion value, not total number of conversions.

4. Maximized clicks

Using this strategy, Google will automatically adjust your bids to maximize the number of clicks you get. You can set a maximum budget, and Google is free to adjust your bids to get you the most clicks. Frankly, we don’t recommend this, but if pure traffic is more important to you than conversions, it might be worth a try, otherwise steer clear of this method.

5. Target search page location

With this strategy, Google will adjust your ad bids based on whether you want to appear on the first page of search results or at the very top. Be very careful with this one, as the bid to get to the top of the page can be expensive. You need to realize that you are giving Google permission to spend your money.

6. Target outranking share

Using this method, you specify a website domain, which can be one of your main competitors, and you ask Google to rank your ads higher than this specific competitor. You can also specify the percentage of time you want to outrank them on the page.

It’s important to note that Google cannot guarantee that you will always outrank your competitors; this depends on how much your competitors are bidding. For beginners, this is a risky strategy because if your competitors bid high, you could end up spending far more than you expected.

Author: Kang Jiewei from Hugo.com

Source: Kang Jiewei, Hugo.com