At DMS, our commitment is to provide world-class performance and expertise, ensuring that our clients experience easy, informed decision-making. Our team of specialists—Alex Booth, Carlos Williams, and Monique Steyn—share their insights on Google Ads bidding strategies to help you understand how to optimise your campaigns effectively.
Understanding Google Ads Bidding Strategies
Google Ads Bidding Strategy is an important tool in paid search. It determines how your ads are served and viewed. There are manual and automated (smart) bidding strategies. Manual strategies let you control granular details like increasing bids for specific demographics or during particular times. In contrast, smart strategies leverage Google’s algorithms to automate these decisions.
A Google Ads bid is a setting that steers your campaign toward a specific goal. Whether you opt for manual bids where you control each aspect or automated ones that rely on Google’s algorithms, your bid essentially determines how your ad competes in the marketplace.
How Bidding Strategies Impact Ad Campaign Performance
Different bidding strategies serve unique purposes. Some of the prominent strategies include:- Manual Cost-per-Click (CPC): Best for advertisers wanting full control over their bids. You may want to start here if running ads for the first time.
- Maximise Clicks: Ideal for driving traffic to your website.
- Maximise Conversions: Focused on getting the most conversions for your budget.
- Target Impression Share: Essentially forces your ad to the top of the results. Useful for defending your brand when competitors are trying to poach your customers by running ads on your brand name!
- ROAS: Good to optimise for conversion value, you can increase conversion value while targeting a specific return on ad spend (ROAS).
Maximise conversions is especially useful for businesses looking to scale quickly without focusing on the cost per conversion.
Factors to Consider Before Deciding on a Bidding Strategy
- Campaign Goals: Define whether you want traffic, conversions, or visibility.
- Data Availability: Automated strategies work best with historical conversion data.
- Budget: Be realistic about what you can afford per click or conversion.
Each campaign should match a bidding strategy aligned with its specific goal. Testing different strategies can also provide valuable insights into what works best.
Choosing the Right Bidding Strategy
When starting without any previous data, it’s often best to begin with manual bidding or automated strategies like maximise clicks to gather initial information.
All strategies are available from the start, but their effectiveness increases as Google gathers more data.
Read more on how you can determine your bidding strategy based on your goals.
Advantages and Limitations of Bidding Strategies
The primary advantage of smart bidding is leveraging Google’s AI for optimal ad placements. However, manual bidding offers greater control, which can be crucial for those with limited budgets.
Smart bidding can adjust bids based on multiple factors like time of day or audience segment in real time, which is something manual strategies can’t match in granularity.
Key Metrics to Monitor
Monitoring key performance indicators (KPIs) like Cost per Conversion, Return on Ad Spend (ROAS), and Impression Share helps in assessing the effectiveness of your bidding strategy.
Best Practices for Optimising Google Ads Bidding Strategies
- Regularly Test Different Strategies: What works for one campaign may not work for another.
- Utilise Google’s Recommendations: Google often provides insights that can optimise your performance, but don’t blindly accept these!
- Adjust Based on Data: Continuously monitor and tweak your campaigns in response to performance metrics.
Automated bidding adjusts in real-time, but it also requires a waiting period for the algorithms to learn, so patience is key. Google suggests waiting for 2 weeks before making changes to a new campaign.
Conclusion
Mastering Google Ads bidding strategies involves an understanding of various components and their impact on your campaign. By analysing your goals, monitoring key metrics, and leveraging both manual and automated strategies, you can drive your campaigns to success.
