Solid info! The 5 most overrated bidding strategies

Search engine paid promotion provides marketers with an effective promotion channel . As search engines continue to launch new commercial promotion products to attract clicks from hundreds of millions of user groups, this is becoming more and more true.

However, this also means that we often face difficult decisions. After all, there is a limited amount of time in a day, so we must choose the priority strategy based on different project goals.

Content is king. No bidding strategy is good or bad. The formulation of the strategy determines the so-called success or failure.

With that being said, I have listed 5 overrated bidding strategies that often provide less effectiveness than expected.

To those who have been in the business for a while, this strategy seems downright silly. Because the number one position is sometimes not the best position.

However, many SEMers are still vying for the top ranking - since they can compete for the first position by spending money, why not?

At this time, self-esteem prevails and rationality is defeated.

Of course, the first position will be very expensive, and even if the click-through rate is high, the cost per click will also increase. This means that getting more traffic comes with more spending.

If your conversion rate is also on the rise, then it's worth spending that money. If the traffic increases but the conversion rate trend is difficult to predict, how can you ensure the quality of the traffic? You must learn to control costs.

People always have high expectations for this strategy, but conversion rates don’t increase significantly just because product promotion is moved to the first position. Of course, it’s understandable if your product has a unique selling point, such as offering a more favorable price or a real buyer show. You can also use this strategy to stimulate an increase in conversion rate.

What should be done?

With a stable return on spend, test different ad positions to find the one that saves the most budget.

Be mentally prepared, it doesn't mean you can't take the first place. We’ve also witnessed people spending 25% of a six-figure monthly budget on just one keyword . It did bring in traffic and satisfied their desire to be number one, but their conversion rate was lower than the average.

Always ask yourself: Is my desire to be number one driven by vanity or is it the best business performance strategy?

It is also quite common for companies not to use their own brand names as keywords. People usually do this to save budget, thinking that in this way, natural search can also bring traffic to their brand.

But this assumption usually requires some practical testing.

Problems often arise when testing this strategy in a highly competitive industry. Generally speaking, the first five search results are paid results , and the sixth one is a natural result. This means that if you don’t use your brand name as a keyword, you’re likely to drop to position 6 or 7 on the search results page, and your competitors will have the opportunity to eat up your brand traffic. From the 1st and 5th positions, the traffic volume decreases exponentially.

Of course, your competitors may also choose to spend a lot of money to beat your brand keywords. We will talk about this situation later.

So what should we do?

You should test how much your organic traffic increases after you stop brand bidding, and then compare it to the number of paid clicks that are lost at the same time. Generally speaking, there will be a huge traffic gap here, enough for your competitors to overtake you.

To test this, you need to calculate the increased cost of using brand advertising and the maximum benefit you would get if you didn’t use advertising. Generally speaking, the added cost of using brand advertising is still lower than not using brand advertising ( the potential profit lost by not using brand advertising is your opportunity cost ). Therefore, using brand advertising is still a very cost-effective strategy that should not be missed.

Remember, different industries are different. Before blindly implementing a strategy, always test it! This will help you make more rational decisions based on data analysis . Usually this means turning on the brand advertising for a period of time and then turning it off for a period of time in order to collect enough data to make a decision.

Even with a limited budget, some companies still use too many search terms in order to drive traffic to all their products and services. They believe that if they can reach a wider audience, more customers will be willing to click on the website or app, leading to higher conversion rates.

However, this is almost impossible.

Why? Although you get good traffic, the budget you spend does not bring high-quality traffic. Simply put: casting a wide net can only increase quantity, not improve quality.

It's good to organize your keywords around common themes, but you should also consider other factors. One of the most important things is to make sure your target audience is impressed when promoting your product or service.

If you find that casting a wide net does not bring in much traffic, it is because you have broken the keywords into too many pieces, which will also cause the traffic to be dispersed. And you’ll find that you’ve actually overlooked the most important part of PPC management: optimization. You spread your budget across too many keywords, leaving not enough budget for effective keywords.

You spend too much money on keywords that don’t bring much traffic, which results in lower conversion rates and inefficient PPC.

What should be done?

To get the most effective return on your limited budget, reduce your target keywords. Choose keywords that have historically proven to bring the highest CPL (cost per lead) and optimal KPI. This can help you allocate your budget well, taking money away from low-quality keywords and injecting it into keywords that can bring more revenue.

Save that budget and invest it in effective strategies like retargeting to ensure you’re present at every step of your audience’s buying cycle.

Now more and more SEMers match each target keyword with a separate ad group. This is a smart approach if used appropriately.

It’s a great idea to separate the keywords that bring the highest traffic and the keywords that bring the best conversion rates and put them into different ad groups so that you can control their own budgets, performance reporting, ad copies , and promotions. However, using this strategy for all keywords would be overkill and would actually reduce your profits.

What should be done?

Identify which keywords are critical to your campaign’s success and place them in their own ad group to ensure you maintain control over their performance this way. In addition to these "high-authority" keywords, the rest should be classified and organized according to keyword groups and themes, rather than being processed individually.

Consider for yourself whether it is worthwhile to spend so much time and energy on this "labor-intensive" strategy. After all, the more you use this strategy, the less effective it will be.

A remarketing strategy is undoubtedly necessary. PPC plays an important role in the increasingly complex user purchase cycle, making it possible to conduct targeted targeting based on website/app activities.

However, there are still some hurdles to overcome for remarketing. It should not be the first choice when launching an advertising campaign.

In theory, it’s a great idea to remarket to consumers who added items to their carts but didn’t complete their orders when they switched to searching for “toys for four-year-olds” on your site. Consumers know what they want, and we know which products they are most likely to ultimately buy, so the deal is a done deal.

For retailers, this is the dream, which is why the lure of remarketing is so hard to resist. Of course, we also have to be rational. After all, remarketing to website visitors on search engines requires reaching at least 1,000 users, and this approach may not be suitable for all companies.

What should be done?

Large online retailers, such as Home Depot or Toys R Us, undoubtedly have such a large number of users and keywords. As such, this should be part of their bidding process.

But if you’re not a retailer of that size, prioritize your efforts elsewhere.

When it comes to marketing, it’s best to start with the basics (site or catalog page visitors) and then expand to a wider audience (such as people who put items in their shopping carts but didn’t complete their orders) as traffic allows.