What is a Bid Strategy for Google AdWords?
Bid Strategies are tailored campaigns designed in Google Ad Words to help you accomplish certain goals. Depending on what your target audience is, you can focus on getting higher click rates, impressions, or conversions.
Bid Strategies Based on Goals
If you want to generate more traffic to your website you should concentrate your efforts on clicks. Therefore, a Cost-per-click (CPC) campaign bid strategy would be most effective.
If you want to increase your brand awareness, then you should focus on impressions. Therefore, a Cost-per-thousand-impressions (CPM) bidding strategy should be used
If you want customers to take a certain action on your website like downloading new software, then you should focus on conversion tracking. The best bidding strategy to increase conversion rates is Cost-per-acquisition (CPA).
CPC Bidding Strategy
If you want to generate more traffic to your website, then there are two CPC strategies that work best
- Maximize Clicks- the simplest automated bidding strategy, where you select a daily limit (max), and the AdWords system will automatically manage your account and place bids for you. The goal is to bring in the most possible clicks to generate the highest volume of traffic given your daily limit
- Manual CPC bidding- allows your to select and manage your maximum CPC bids. It allows you to personalize your bidding strategy based on what you deem most valuable. You can focus on bidding for keywords or placements, and use your manual bidding to allocate more or less of your budget towards one or the other.
CPM Bidding Strategy
If you want to generate more views, CPM bidding strategy will allow you to control the visibility of your ads by fine tuning your maximum CPM bids. Manual CPM bidding isn’t ideal for customers where the goal is direct response from their customers. Here are some useful scenarios for CPM bidding:
- want to increase awareness, but not necessarily generate traffic
- targeting particular placements, not just keywords
- your message is the ad itself (people don’t need to click through to your website)
CPA Bidding Strategy
If you are searching for higher conversion rates, then CPA bidding will be your best strategy. It allows you to bid directly for conversions, but your campaign must pass a few requirements to pursue the strategy. First, you must have conversion tracking enabled, second, your campaign must target the search network, display network, or both. Here are some useful scenarios where CPA bidding would be beneficial:
- the campaign is direct response focused.
- the campaign has a single, well-defined, end goal conversion, (download, purchase, sign up)
- campaign conversion rate is relatively stable from week to week
Receiving at least 50 conversions per month. Since AdWords relies on historical data, it is important there is as much data as possible. The more data available, the more accurate AdWords can optimize your return on investment.
