Understanding Google Ads Bidding Strategies. More Choice Than Ever!

Google Ads now offers a wide range of different bidding strategies, each one is designed to help advertisers achieve their specific goals.

Whether you are looking to maximise conversions, simply increase your website traffic or help to improve your brand awareness, selecting the correct bidding strategy is one of the most important foundations of your campaign.

We thought it would be useful to put together a few top tips for you to consider to help you get it right.

First of all, we need to look at the core distinction between manual bidding and automated bidding.

With manual bidding, you set the bids manually for each specific keyword or ad group.

This gives you full control but requires your ongoing oversight and manual adjustments on an often frequent basis.

For example, as competitors increase their own bids, you may need to increase your bids to maintain your position in the search results.

Whereas Google‘s automated bidding strategies allow Google algorithms to automatically set bids based on your goals, leveraging the artificial intelligence within the Google Ads platform to optimise campaign performance in real-time.

Whilst you still need to keep an eye on things, there is less need for manual interaction compared to manual bidding.

CPC bidding is primarily used where your goal is to drive traffic to your website. You have the option of manual CPC or enhanced CPC.

With the enhanced CPC, Google will automatically adjust your bids for clicks that are more likely to lead to a conversion, whilst allowing you some level of manual control over bidding.

Then there are some CPA bidding strategies.

CPA is an abbreviation of cost per acquisition.

CPA bidding strategies focus on driving conversions at a targeted cost per action.

Target CPA

So for example, if you wanted to generate sales at an average of £20 each you would input this to the Google Ads platform and Google’s algorithms would try to generate your actions at this particular price.

Google would adjust your bids to help you acquire conversions at the specified cost however, there are no specific guarantees here.

You also have the option to maximise conversions, where Google sets bids automatically to generate the highest possible number of conversions for your daily, weekly or monthly budget.

ROAS

Target ROAS is where Google will adjust your bids to maximise the conversion value based on your desired return on ad spend.

So for example you require a 5X return on your ad spend and you have a £1,000 monthly budget, Google would optimise your campaign to try and generate £5,000 worth of sales in this instance.

This particular strategy is much more relevant for e-commerce stores.

There are also bidding strategies based on impression share, for example, the Target impression share strategy.

This is less popular but still has a place for some advertisers.

This will ensure that your ad appears in a certain percentage of the auctions, e.g. you could target impression share aiming to achieve visibility in 50% of the Google auctions.

It is important that you choose the right bidding strategy for your campaign in order to maximise success.

This does depend on your own campaign goals, budget and experience, and whilst manual strategies do offer more control, they do require constant adjustments whereas the automated bidding strategies now offered by Google leverage the AI within Google to optimise results over time.

Here at Altitude Internet, we have deep experience in helping clients achieve success with their Google Ads strategies, so whether or not you are new to Google Ads and considering PPC for the first time or an experienced advertiser looking to improve the results our team would be happy to schedule a call with you to see if we can be of assistance.

We have experience of helping clients in multiple business sectors achieve success online so click here to schedule a call with a member of our team

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Reasons to choose Altitude Internet for your Google Ads services.

• Established Since 2014
• Helping Clients generate excellent results for over a decade
• Over 700 + Five Star Reviews
• Google Partner Agency
• Offices in the UK, Ireland and Asia
• Honest, transparent advice
• Detailed clear and easy-to-understand reporting
• Google Smart bidding champions

Google Ads is just one way to generate traffic, leads and enquiries for your website, you can also consider SEO (Search Engine Optimisation).
Click here to find out more about how search engine optimisation can help your business too.