Google Ads bid strategies.
That's what we're going to be talking about in this video.
Hi, I'm Ilana Wechsler from Teachtraffic.com
recording a video for measureschool.com. And as mentioned,
we're going to be talking about all the different bid strategies,
specifically the automated bid strategies you need to pay attention to.
I'm going to show you which ones are good and which ones I get great results
with and importantly, which ones you should avoid.
So make sure you watch the whole video.
So let's go dive into an account and I'm going to walk you through it.
So here we are in our live Google Ads account.
And before I show you all the different
types of bid strategies, you first need to decide,
are you going to do Google's manual bidding or automated bidding?
So manual bidding is as it sounds,
where you as an Advertiser are manually selecting what is the maximum cost per
click you're willing to pay at a keyword level.
Or you're going to do Google's automated
bidding, where you essentially hand over the bidding reins to Google and let Google
decide what you end up paying at a cost per click level.
But there are constraints that you can apply so that Google doesn't kind of go
a little bit crazy in what they spend on a cost per click level.
Okay, so if you do manual bidding, that's pretty self explanatory, really.
The purpose of this video is to explain
and go into depth on Google's automated bid strategies.
So you might be wondering, if you go for Google's automated bidding,
how do they decide what to bid on a cost per click?
And essentially, they use their machine learning and artificial intelligence
mechanisms to bid differently for different people.
If you think about it,
they own Google Search, they own YouTube, they own Gmail, they own Google Chrome,
they own Google Analytics, Google Ads for business.
So they are essentially a data company.
And so they bid differently as per all the data they have on individuals.
Okay, that's really Simplistically explained.
So it's definitely worth experimenting with Google's automated bid strategies
and specifically the ones that I'm going to talk about in this video,
because that will be the future of advertising on Google,
where you really won't be messing around with changing bids every day, up or down.
You're just going to rely on Google's AI
and machine learning to really optimize for what your goals are.
So how do you find out which bid strategy you are currently using?
If you're unsure and you've got a search
campaign live, essentially what you do is you go into your campaign.
So I'm in one of the campaigns at the moment.
As you can see here, it says Target CPA column here.
So obviously for this particular campaign, I'm doing target CPA bidding.
But to show you where to find that, you just go to columns, modify columns,
you go to Attributes and you want to click this bid strategy,
type column and that will reveal to you what is your bid strategy type.
So if I click okay, I Scroll across.
You'll see, the bid strategy type here is Maximize Conversions with the Target CPA
bidding, which kind of leads me to the next part of this video,
which is what are the different types of bid strategies you can do?
All right, so let's go to the settings
section in one of my campaigns and I'm going to go to bidding and what I'm going
to do is I'm just going to change bid strategies and this is going to give all
the possible options of bid strategies you can do.
And as you can see here,
it's broken down into manual bid strategies, which has manual CPC.
These are the different types of automated bid strategies that you can do.
So this first one here of Maximize Clicks.
As you can see, the help has popped up
next to it says to set bids to help you get the most clicks for your budget.
Personally, I'm not a fan of using this
particular bid strategy because generally the goal of me running a campaign is
to get conversions, whatever conversions are, be it leads or sales.
So Maximize Clicks isn't going to optimize for my objective.
It's going to optimize just to get as much traffic as I possibly can.
And really, that's not the goal. Okay.
But if that is your goal for your
campaign, then by all means you could choose Maximize Clicks.
This next bid strategy,
which is Maximized Conversions, is essentially you saying to Google,
Hey Google, I want you to get me as many leads or sales whatever is your conversion
objective within the constraints of my budget.
When you select this,
the default setting is that this Target Cost Per Acquisition is unchecked,
which means get me as many conversions as possible at any cost.
All right.
Now if you are somebody who is quite constrained with how much you're willing
to pay for a lead or a sale, then I would definitely recommend
assigning a Target Cost Per Acquisition or a Target CPA amount.
And this gives Google kind of constraints
as to what is your Target cost per Acquisition.
And I have to say they're actually pretty good at reaching it.
And obviously, given this constraint, it will affect the number of impressions
you get and therefore in turn the amount of traffic that you get because
of the click through rate and conversion rate, et cetera.
If you find when you do Target CPA bidding that you're not getting any impressions
and clicks, you may need to increase your Target CPA amount to give Google a little
bit more wiggle room in what it is willing to bid at a cost per click level.
This Maximize Conversions with Target CPA
constraint is definitely one of my favorite bid strategies to do.
However, Target CPA bidding does need data in your account, ideally 30 to 40 or even
50 conversions in a 30 day period before you do Target CPA bidding.
Okay. If you don't have that amount of data
in your account or your account doesn't have as much conversion data,
then maybe you deselect this and just do Maximize Conversions as a starting point
to kind of get as many conversions under your belt even if they're unprofitable.
And then you can set this Target Cost Per Acquisition Constraint
once you've got some more conversion data in your account.
Okay.
Maximize Conversions or with the Target CPA is one of my favorite ones.
The next one is Maximized Conversion Value.
This is pretty much for people running e
commerce stores where the revenue amount is coming in.
Okay.
And really it's the same as Maximized Conversions.
It's just got the value assigned to it.
So I very much like to use this
Target Return on Ad Spend or Target ROAS Goal Objective.
And it's a percentage amount.
So you might say if you've got like say
a 30% margin, you might want to set your Target ROAS amount to be 300%.
And Google is going to really try and achieve that goal for you.
If you want to go a little bit more aggressive and possibly maybe lose money
on the front end to make money back on the back end, if you've got a recurring
product that you sell, you would drop your ROAS target to maybe let's say 150%.
Okay.
And Maximize Conversion Value with the Target ROAS Constraint is also
one of my other favorite bid strategies to use.
And for a lot of ecommerce people that I
help people with, I get them to implement this.
And I have to also say Google is pretty good at achieving it.
You might look at this and think, heck,
I want to have a great ROAS and so you might want to set it to 500%.
The risk with setting too high a ROAS target is that you don't get the scale,
you don't get the quantity of sales because Google's really constrained
with trying to achieve a certain level of profitability.
So such is the balance of where you set that Target ROAS amount.
Hopefully that makes sense.
And the last type of automated bid
strategy is Target Impression Share, where you're really trying to get Google
to optimize for you to get a certain number of impressions.
And so here you can say where you want
your ads to appear anywhere on the results page, top of the results page,
or the absolute top, which is the number one ad spot.
And this top of results would be above the SEO Organic listings.
And then you can set a target Percentage Impression share.
So you might say 75%, but you also add in a constraint of a maximum CPC bid limit.
Personally, I don't really use this Target Impression Share bid strategy
because once again, my goals are always conversion focused.
So really my two recommended bid
strategies are Maximized Conversions with the target CPA or target ROAS.
So there you have it.
Those are the different bid strategies that you can use.
Let me know in the comments what you think of this video and also which bid strategy
is your preferred one and see you on the next video.
All right. Thanks Ilana for this great information.
If this video helps you out then please
hit that like button so we can share it with and more to other people.
And if you want to find out more about
AdWords tracking analytics, then check out this playlist right over
there and from everybody here at measureschool.
Happy measuring.