Google Ads Bidding Strategy – Don’t Know What You’re Doing?

Getting into Google Ads and you need a more in-depth look at your Google Ads bidding strategy?

Many small businesses and beginner advertisers find themselves restricted by limited funds, which makes it difficult to achieve their goals through paid advertising. However, when you learn how to effectively use AdWords bidding strategies, you can maximize your return on investment (ROI).

Done right, this can turn a small budget into a big win. Let’s give you the essential tips for AdWords bidding so you can do a lot more with less spending.

I actually remember feeling similar when I first started getting into paid advertising campaigns at the marketing agency I worked at. The first time doing anything can be an intimidating process.

But as a business owner and pseudo marketer, it’s important to understand how to set up your paid advertising campaigns so you get the most out of your budget.

To do this, you can use several types of bidding strategies for different types of ads.

Below, let’s review the bidding strategies that will drive results when you use Google Ads.

Key Factors Affecting the Ads Performance

The performance of your ad is affected by several factors, including:

• Quality score
• Keywords
• Landing page optimization
• Bids

It’s vital that you remain aware of your advertising budget so that your campaigns are always optimized for the best performance.

Why You Should Bid to Meet Your Business Goals

AdWords bidding for keywords can be a little confusing for newcomers to Google Ads, and many people make the mistake of spending a lot for relatively few conversions.

Many marketers believe they should aim for the highest position in Google’s Search Engine Result Page (SERPs), however, that should not be your ultimate Google Ads bidding strategy. Instead, focus on meeting the specific goals of your business.

With a good bidding strategy, you can develop more relevant, engaging ads, which help reduce costs, thus earning you cheaper clicks and more conversions. Over time, your ad rank will improve.

Now that you understand the high-level overview of what Google Ads bidding strategy is, how it can be used, how it is ranked and how you can use it to meet your business goals – lets look at the specific strategies we can use.

Google Ads Bidding Strategy

Getting started with PPC ads can seem like a difficult task if you’ve never done it before.

Before you review the options for Google bidding strategies, it’s important to understand how to build a campaign.

Now, let’s dive into the options that Google has for bidding strategies.

1. Manual Cost Per Click (CPC)

Similar to the manual strategies for Facebook, if you want to have more control over the cost and spend, this is a good strategy for you.

With manual CPC, you select the price that you’re willing to pay for each click. Then, Google will ensure you never spend over that amount for a click.

2. Target Cost Per Acquisition (CPA)

With this strategy, you can set a target CPA that lets Google know how much you want to spend on producing an action.

According to Google, “Using historical information about your campaign and evaluating the contextual signals present at auction-time, Target CPA bidding automatically finds an optimal bid for your ad each time it’s eligible to appear. Google Ads sets these bids to achieve an average CPA equal to your target across all campaigns using this strategy.”

With this set up, you pay for conversions rather than clicks.

3. Target ROAS (Return on Ad Spend)

You can determine how much you want to get back from your ad spend with PPC ads as well.

This is a great strategy to use if you want to get more conversion value at a target ROAS that you’ve set yourself.

4. Maximize Clicks

Sometimes when you set up a PPC campaign, all you care about is maximizing your clicks.

When that’s the case, you can use this strategy to let Google adjust your campaign automatically to get the most amount of clicks.

This is the simplest, most straightforward way to bid for clicks. All you need to do is set your average daily budget and Google will do the rest.

5. Maximize Conversions

On the other hand, if conversions are the main metric you’re using for success, you might want to look into a maximize conversions strategy.

With this strategy, Google will focus on optimizing your bid strategy to help you get conversions.

This is a good strategy to use if you want to spend your entire budget while getting the most conversions possible.

6. Target Search Page Location

If you want your ad to rank in a specific place on the search engine results page, this is a good strategy to consider.

Google will optimize your bidding strategy to get your ad to show up in a specific place.

7. Target Outranking Share

With this type of strategy, Google allows you to choose how often you want to outrank your competitors.

This is a good strategy if you’re focused on increasing the competitiveness of your ads.

8. Enhanced CPC

With this strategy, you can automatically adjust your manual bids to try to maximize conversions.

This is just an enhanced version of the manual CPC strategy. If you’re testing out CPC ads, this is a good strategy to learn more.

Final Thoughts

Ultimately, you should experiment and figure out which strategies work for your business. Even if you do an automatic bidding strategy, you should watch it carefully and monitor the results.

At the Serial Seller, we prefer ROAS as a metric to track as we also have business metrics in place that allow us to understand how much we can afford to spend on a acquiring a new customer to make them profitable.

If you want assistance with setting up your Google PPC campaigns and your Google Ads bidding strategy in particular, Book a call with us now!