The art of Bid Optimization for your Ads

Advertising any product online requires a lot of research and efforts. After all, the success rate of your product being bought online has a lot to do with the ad’s position online. The ad’s position on the internet is determined further by multiple factors such as keyword, bid, relevance, etc. 

Bids are an important factor while deciding the success of your ads online. But what are bids? And why to optimize them?

Why Optimize the Bids?

A bid represents the maximum amount of money an advertiser is willing to pay for an auction where advertisers compete for displaying their ads to the potential buyers. The entire world of digital marketing provides a place for online advertisers where they can basically bid or pay a certain amount of money in return for their ads to be displayed online. 

The amount of bidding along with a number of other factors determine the order in which your ad will be displayed. So to ensure that your ad rates higher in the search result, you need to make your bids efficiently. An ideal bid price will only lead you to attract more clicks. 

Now there are many strategies for bidding an ideal amount for your ads to increase their exposure on the internet. Are you having a hard time understanding how to optimize your bids?

You have arrived at the right place! To know everything about bid optimization, keep on reading! Our completely curated information will help you understand bids clearly and help you in managing your bids like a pro!

How to Create Bids?

Creating bids is essential as it affects the position of your ad. Understanding how to create bids is important because it might be possible that you end up overpaying. Several points must be kept in mind while creating your bids for the first time.

• Your budget determines the number of times your ad can be clicked on a particular day or month.
• The maximum amount that you are willing to pay is known as the keyword bid. It might be possible that the actual cost is less than this. 
• Always review and adjust the bids by viewing and analyzing the result of your ads online. This is because bids are not at all static in nature; they change accordingly. 

Now there are two basic things that must be kept in mind while creating bids. These pointers can be helpful for both first-timers and also for those who are already creating their bids. 

Identify Your Budget and Then Plan  

Your budget is the most important parameter for your PPC strategy and bidding optimization. Before starting to bid, make sure that you are able to afford the bidding amount into your budget. If you are just starting out, you may consider the formula :

Desired Clicks you want Per day x Average Cost Per Click. 

Using this formula, you can easily figure out the desired number of clicks and your average budget. Once you are done creating a budget, you can easily identify those keywords, ads, etc. that are working and that are not. This way, you can either trim down or modify the ads. 

While making a budget, always try to focus on the ROI (Return on Investment). If you feel you have a high return by pulling in more traffic, you can surely increase your budget by a small amount. In fact, Google Ads helps in letting sellers know whether their budget is getting in the way of creating more traffic or not. 

Setting Bids 

Creating a budget can be considered as the first step towards your bid management settings. After this, you need to focus on setting the bids. There are two types of the bid that you can set. 

• Manual Bidding
• Automatic Bidding

Let us understand each carefully to understand these, better

All About Manual Bidding

What is Manual Bidding?

Manual bidding takes place without the assistance of AI or smart solutions. Advertisers bid on the basis of their own experience, analysis and the performance of the factors. This process requires advertisers to work more closely with the system of bidding and requires more patience and time. Advertisers using manual bidding need to have good PPC knowledge to get a good ROI. 

For Whom is Manual Bidding Good?

Advertisers can opt for manual bidding only if :

• Your budget is limited.
• You are using a small amount of consumer data that is less than 30 days worth data.
• You want to have control over your campaigns, preferences and ads to make quick changes whenever possible. 
• You have a lot of time and effort to do it. 

Benefits of Manual Bidding

• You have total control over it: With manual bidding, you can easily bid specific terms and get more traffic on your ads.
• Quick reactions: With manual bidding, you can easily deduce any new competitors or a slump in your performance and take action over it. Your reactions towards any issue will be quick, and hence less impact will be on the budget. 
• No delay in actions: With manual bidding, any action will be done quickly, there won’t be any delay. Automatic bidding may take time to be implemented. 

Demerits of Manual Bidding

• Human error: Since manual bidding has to be done by a human, it is prone to any kind of inefficiencies or mistakes. 
• Demanding and taxing: Manual bidding requires a lot of time and energy that might become demanding over time. It might become a full-time job that requires a lot of time. 
• Limited flexibility: We’ll be talking about automated bidding next, but if we compare these two, manual bidding does not offer flexibility with regards to the structuring of the account. 

All About Automated Bidding

What is Automated Bidding?

Automated bidding as the name suggests is done automatically through AI-led keyword bidding procedure. This type of bidding is known as smart bidding as algorithms are used for optimizing your bids according to your PPC goals. 

For Whom is Automated Bidding Good?

Advertisers can opt for automated bidding if :

• Your PPC accounts are large. 
• You want to save on your time and energy and also deal with a lot of data. 
• You do not possess the expertise for manual bidding. 
• Your specific goals need to be met. Automated bidding also requires investment, so if you have that kind of budget, only then indulge in this. 

Benefits of Automated Bidding

• Segmentation: There are more options for segmentation, more customizations based on your interests. You can create special and customized ad campaigns. 
• Efficiency and time saving: By using automation, you can actually use AI to do all your tasks and focus on more important aspects of ad campaigns like growth strategy. 
• Exact predictions: Using automated bidding will help in making accurate and exact predictions, thus giving smart decisions to take. 
• Attributes and signals about users: Smart bidding provides some of the users attributes that are helpful for the ad campaigns. Some of these are 
  • Demographics of users such as age, gender, language, OS, location.
  • Ad format and ad performance
  • The behaviour of users like how many users viewed your ad, etc. 
  • Other behaviours of users such as what time they are viewing or which day, etc.

Demerits of Automated Bidding 

While there are a number of things that automation can provide, it also has its disadvantages. 

• Automation can’t be left alone: AI does provide a number of benefits, but at the end of the day, it is still technology. So advertisers must always keep a tab on the working or changes of AI. 
• Delays: Automated bidding may lead to potential delays as it might take time to sync with the platform. 
• Requirements for conversions or traffic: A good flow of traffic and conversion volume flow is required for the smart bidding to work efficiently. Until that is there, you might not get good results. 

Evaluation and Optimization of Bids 

For full optimization and evaluation of the bids, it is imperative to look at the status of your ads once it starts running smoothly. You can ponder over questions like : 

What days and times are generating maximum revenue?

Which are the locations where people are searching?

Which of the keywords is leading to maximum clicks?

Assess the Costs and Revenue Generated

One of the best ways to check your campaign’s performance is to see which keywords were clicked more and which keywords got a lot of impressions. You can try using CTR (Click through rate ) to check on these pointers. You can even edit the bidding based on the result of these factors to generate more sales. 

One of the other ways of doing it is to set up conversion tracking for the account. Automated bidding strategies are one of the best means to adjust the bids according to the goals. 

Increase the ROI by Adjusting the Bids 

You can start using the locations, keywords, devices, etc. for getting good results and basically increasing your ROI. 

Some of the situations where you should start changing your bids are 

• Low CPC( Cost Per Click) with the high conversion rate 
• High CPC with a low conversion rate
• Low traffic 

A few pointers to keep in mind while adjusting the bids to increase ROI.

• Always edit or modify your bids in small increments. This way, you will not change something drastic and can always re-evaluate your bids.
• Try to improve the quality score of your ad. This way, you don’t need to increase the price/costs. 

Automated Bidding Strategies to Try 

We have dealt with the functioning and benefits of automated bidding. Now let us look at some of the best strategies of automated bidding that you can try!

Target Cost Per Acquisition 

The Target Cost Per Acquisition (tCPA) helps in getting conversions within the CPA goal. It focuses more on acquiring one customer. This is a good strategy when you don’t want to pay for clicks but want to generate cost-effective leads. 

Basically, with tCPA, you can bid limit for tCPA and Google Ads also recommend a target CPA. You can even set the maximum and minimum bid limit. 

Maximize Conversions

Maximize conversions helps in setting keyword bids to get conversions possible. For this strategy to work, you need to make sure to enable the conversion tracking and then rest Google will do. The automated bidding mechanism checks your budget and then decides the most efficient way to use it. 

Target Return On Ad Spend

The Target ROAS will basically hit a specific value set in your campaign that will enable you to get a higher return on your spending of ads. Here also you must enable the conversion tracking and set up conversion values. 

Target Impression Share

This strategy helps in getting your ad higher on Google Search Engine Result Page, also known as SERP. While using the target impression strategy, you can choose to let your ad be displayed on the absolute top of the page or anywhere on the SERP. According to that, Google will set up your CPC bid limit to let you know the placement of your ad. 

Maximizing Clicks 

This is very simple. THe maximize clicks strategy will help in getting maximum possible clicks from your PPC budget. The automation will itself set the bids in accordance with earning a click on the ads. It will also consider the various parameters such as demographics, location, day, time, to optimize them better. You can also set a limit to the bids. 

Summary

As an advertiser, it becomes one of your topmost activities to keep checking and experimenting with different strategies to get the maximum output. CPC, keywords, conversions are some of the important things to always keep in mind as an advertiser. You can always try out manual bidding or automated bidding based on your efforts, time and budget.