[PPC] – Google Ads Bidding Strategy, your success

Google Ads Bidding Strategyis a fundamental pillar to take into account when managing your Google Ads campaigns. Much of the success happens here.

In the end it is similar to when you go to play a football match; the team that has made a strategy for the match taking care of the smallest detail will have more chances to win. And so, with many other things.

Well, Google Ads gives you several options of bidding strategies so that you can choose the right one, according to your objectives and budget. The latter two play a crucial role in choosing the bidding strategy, Google tells you here.

So, if you don’t know very well which Google Ads bidding strategy you should choose at any given time, or you don’t know which one to start with or you simply don’t know what each one is and what advantages and disadvantages to obtain from each one of them: this is your post.

What are Google Ads auctions like?

Before we start talking about bidding strategies on Google Ads, we cannot ignore Google Ads auctions.

Google Ads auctions is the process through which all our ads pass when a person searches on Google Ads. Our ads compete against our competitors’ ads for the top position.

The referee/judge here is Google. It is in charge of elaborating a ranking, in an instant way, of the most relevant ads for the user.

And now you may ask yourself: what does Google Ads take into account in the auction?

Google takes into account different indexes or aspects to elaborate this ranking:

1. Quality levelof the account. This reflects that you have been doing things right from the start. Google rewards these types of people.
2. The Maximum Cost per Click of the ad. It’s great that you have a perfect ad, but… you know: the money is the money.
3. The relevance of the ad to the searcher. It would be something similar to the Quality Level. But this one takes into account the Quality Level of your ads, the search keyword, the data history, etc…

In relation to this last point you can improve the CTR of your ads with these tips. Here you can improve your CTR and in some way your Quality Level. To further improve the quality of your ads you can also run campaigns on SKAGs model.

Which is better: manual or automatic bids?

It depends . In the end it’s like everything else; it depends on an infinite number of things, whether it’s the needs of your business, the objectives, the budget, the time you’re going to spend on it and a whole lot more.

We usually combine manual and automatic bids. We are aware that AI is progressing effectively and so far our friend Google Ads is doing things right.

In the end no strategy is the best, it is the best when you choose the right one (taking into account your objectives) and you make sure it is the best by making different optimizations and changes around the demands of your target audience.

Neither the good ones are so good, nor the bad ones are so bad. That’s why I’m going to tell you in detail about the manual bids and the automatic bids so that you can choose the option that best suits you.

Automatic bidding on Google Ads

I’m sure by the time you’ve read the automatic word you’ll be happy and rubbing your hands together. We all like to have them work for us, and Google is for the work of this. But of course, it has its “things” that we must take into account when choosing this type of bid.

Advantages of automatic bids

1. You will gain in time. In the end, Google will be in charge of adjusting your bids, developing your Google Ads bidding strategy and even who to show the ad to.
2. If you have an account with many campaigns, ad groups and their daily management takes up a lot of your time, perhaps this is a solution.

3. The algorithm will work to make your ads work in the best possible way. But of course, the algorithm needs “food” to work that well. This meal is the data, i.e. the data history of the account. The better and the more history you have: the better this type of bidding will work.

If you do not have much history, you should have between 30 and 50 conversions at leastin the Ad Group to be able to move to an automatic Google Ads bidding strategy.

Disadvantages of automatic bids

1. Be careful with modifications. Don’t make changes too quickly. You know that for every change you make the algorithm takes 7 days to assimilate and adapt. So be patient and if you have to make a lot of changes do them all at once. Reinforce this with A/B test.
2. It’s automatic, but be careful, it doesn’t hurt to look at it often so that it’s having the expected result.
3. Budget. You need an adequate budget to get those sacred conversions that will allow Google to optimize your campaign.

Manual bidding on Google Ads

In manual bidding, you are the one who manages everything. In other words, you are the one who is in charge of implementing a strategy and seeing that expectations are being met, and also the one who is in charge of optimizing the budget and the bids in an efficient way.

Here it is you who sets your own bids. It is a laborious job and in the end almost daily, but the results can be very good.

Now, you have to consider the advantages and disadvantages to see if this is really the Google Ads bidding strategy you choose.

Advantages of manual bidding

1. You have full control over your campaigns. Here Google will not manage anything for you, but you are master and lord of all the changes and decisions you make in this regard. You will be in charge of the bids.
2. You have to be on top of it every day. Bids can change due to different factors. That’s why you should be watching the bids every day so you don’t lose market share and sales opportunities.

Disadvantages of manual bidding

1. Time. You’ll have to spend a lot of time on it to ensure that the results are good and that the objectives set out in the account are met.
2. For large accounts this may be a bit excessive. So think about it if you have an account where you want to do everything manually.

In the end, as you will have seen, everything has its positive side. For example, manual bidding to start an account is good because you get to know how the market behaves in relation to your campaigns. After a while you can switch to automatic bids. But not from the beginning, remember.

In the end I understand that automatic bids are for those people who are not afraid to experiment and get into the world of Google Ads, while automatic bids are for those who want to put on automatic pilotand not have to check the campaigns so much.

We always make a mix. Since there are some campaigns that we prefer to control the bids for reasons of budget optimization. But there are others in which AI works very well.

What types of bidding strategies are there in Google Ads?

The types of bidding strategies on Google Ads are very diverse. It is diverse because we know that each campaign has a different objective. Either because you want to send traffic, or capture leads, generate sales, or make your ad visible. That is why Google Ads, aware of all these objectives, offers an extensive list of bids to suit each one of them.

They are as follows:

Manual Cost per Clic or manual CPC

It could be said that this is one of the most basic of manual bidding.

This strategy will take you time to manage all the offers as you have more control over them. To start with an account is the one I always recommend, together with Maximize clicks, so that you get to know the market.

One advantage is that you can bid by keyword. And the disadvantage is that you do not know when it is better to raise or lower the bid, unlike the Google Ads algorithm.

Cost per Clic or CPC

This is the next level after the manual CPC. In this case, it isthe AI that manages the bids. With this type of bidding your number of clicks can increase unlike the manual CPC. This is the automatic option.

In the end, what you do here is give Google the power to manage your offers and optimise them.

The clearest disadvantage is that you cannot manage the price per keyword click.

Enhanced CPC or eCPC

Now you will say: what is the E for? the E is for Enhanced. If in the automatic CPC you managed to increase your clicks, in this one you will be able to increase your conversions.

This option gives Google the power to increase auctions by 30% based on the convertibility of the search. This is where the algorithm and AI come together to build the CPC bidding strategy that will generate the best results for you.

Remember that Google needs a total of 15 conversions in the last 30 days to work effectively. If there is more: so much the better.

Cost per Acquisition or CPA

The bidding strategy of Google Ads conversions In this type of strategy what you do is set a ceiling price that you are willing to pay for a sale. This is very effective for those businesses that know the maximum cost they can set for a product so as not to lose money.

This type of strategy is very nice, but as in many of these types what is needed is a minimum of data. The minimum here is that you have a total of 15 conversions in the last 30 days, to make it work effectively.

Cost per Thousand Impressions (CPM)

This bidding strategy on Google Ads is only available for ads on Google Display and the YouTube platform.

Here you don’t pay per click, but here you pay for every time the ads have been viewed or have generated impressions. They are usually per thousand.

You have to be careful because maybe your ad is in a corner that you can hardly see in Marca and Google will understand that you have seen it. So take these data with a grain of salt.

Viewable Cost Per Thousand Impressions (vCPM)

This strategy is one step ahead of the previous one. Here you pay for a thousand visible ads with certain minimums. For example, in the case of YouTube it is seen in more than two seconds and in the case of a Google partner page it is seen in 50%.

ROAS

When you come to this strategy of bidding on Google Ads is that you have done things very well.

ROAS is a strategy that will focus on return on investment. In the case of Google Ads it does so in percentages. It’s great for increasing sales and value.

However, you must work a little to develop a ROAS strategy according to the data you are obtaining. There’s no point in putting on a ROAS that doesn’t fit the trend of your account.

Here too, 15 conversions are required in the last 30 days.

Maximise conversions

If what you want is to see the more sales the better: this is yours.

Google Ads will take care of getting as many conversions as possible based on your budget. All you have to do is put in the daily budget and it starts working.

The good thing here is that you set a budget and you can control it. It’s also good because you focus on what everybody wants: sales but in return you lose control.

Maximise clicks

Same as above but with clicks. If what you want is clicks and traffic to the web, you don’t have to look any further.

All you have to do is give them a budget and they will click on it every day. I usually recommend them for the beginning of a campaign, so that data is collected quickly and then you can move on to a CPC strategy.

You will gain visits quickly but these visits can still be of low quality. The good thing is that you will feed your remarketing audiences, for your RLSA campaigns.

These are the bidding strategies that you will find in Google Ads when managing your campaigns. They are all good for a particular purpose. So if you don’t have a goal, you can’t choose one of them. You must have a clear objective in advance to go for it with the strategy that best supports it.

For example:

• If you want to do branding campaigns, you will have to focus on CPM or VCPM type bids so that there are visualizations of your brand.
• If you want to generate conversions you’ve already seen that the best ones would be CPA, ROAS or Maximise conversions.
• But if you want to generate traffic to your website, there’s nothing better than maximising clicks or any form of CPC.

Conclusion

I already told you before, and I’ll tell you again: if what you want is to have good results at the end you have to apply a bidding strategy in Google Ads according to it. Everything goes together in the end.

It is not a question of putting money or starting on Google Ads because others are doing it. But do it because you really have an end that your means to achieve it is advertising on this platform.

It should also be said that you must dedicate a lot of time to the study and management of the campaigns so that the results are as expected. It is not all about selecting the bidding strategy on Google Ads and working. In our blog, we tell you a lot about the vast world of PPC.

I hope that thanks to this post you will know more clearly what strategy is best suited to each of your campaigns and start optimising your results. Otherwise do not hesitate to ask us for help.