Understanding bidding basics Flashcards
Focus on clicks
CPC bidding gives you these choices:
Automatic bidding
This is the easiest way to bid. Set a daily budget and let AdWords adjust your CPC bids to bring you the most clicks possible within that budget. Manual bidding Take full control of your CPC bids. Manual bidding lets you set bids at the ad group level, or for individual keywords or ad placements, so you know you're bidding just what you want for the clicks that mean the most to you.
Focus on impressions
CPM bidding, like CPC manual bidding, lets you set bids at the ad group level, or for individual placements. Note that CPM bidding is only available for the following campaign types:
“Display Network only - All features”
“Display Network only - Remarketing”
Focus on conversions
With this advanced bidding method, you tell AdWords the amount you’re willing to pay for a conversion, or cost-per-acquisition (CPA).
To use CPA bidding you must have conversion tracking turned on, among other things, so CPA bidding is suited for
for intermediate and advanced AdWords users.
Each bid strategy is suited for different kinds of campaigns and advertising goals. For the purposes of bidding, you’ll want to consider three basic types of goals, along with your current campaign settings.
- If you want to generate traffic to your website, focusing on
- If you want to increase brand awareness – not drive traffic to your site – focusing on
- If you want customers to take a direct action on your site, and you’re using conversion tracking, then it may be best to focus on
- focusing on clicks could be ideal for you. Cost-per-click (CPC) bidding – manual or automatic – may be right for your campaign.
- focusing on impressions may be your strategy. You can use cost per thousand impression (CPM) bidding to put your message in front of customers.
- focus on conversions. Cost-per-acquisition (CPA) bidding lets you do that.
With manual CPC bidding, you can fine-tune your maximum CPC bids to help control the cost and volume of clicks on your ads. Manual CPC bidding could be a good choice for you if your campaign fits this description:
You’d like to control maximum CPC bids for individual ad groups, keywords, or placements.
You’re mainly interested in increasing website traffic, not necessarily brand awareness.
You don’t need to reach a target budget every month. (If you do need to reach a target budget, automatic bidding may be a better choice.)
Your campaign targets the Search Network, the Display Network, or both.
Focus on impression Manual CPM Bidding
Manual bidding for impressions, also known as CPM bidding, lets you control the visibility of your ads by fine-tuning your maximum CPM bids.
Here are some cases in which we’d recommend manual CPM bidding:
Your campaign type is “Display Network only - Remarketing”, not Google Search Network.
Your ads are designed to increase awareness, but not necessarily generate clicks or traffic.
You prefer the traditional industry metrics of CPM (cost-per-thousand impressions) campaigns.
You’re targeting particular placements, not just keywords. (Combined with placement targeting, bidding for impressions can help ensure your ads appear to a specific audience that will be interested in your ads.)
You’re mainly interested in increasing brand awareness. Image ads and other multimedia formats often serve that purpose best, and these ad formats run on the Display Network.
Your message is in the ad itself, so you don’t need people to click through to your site. This may apply to events (such as a television premiere) or political advertising.
CPA (cost-per-acquisition) bidding is an advanced option that lets you bid directly for conversions.
Your campaign must meet a few requirements in order to be eligible to use CPA bidding:
You have conversion tracking enabled.
Your campaign has received at least 15 conversions in the last 30 days. The AdWords system requires this conversion history in order to make accurate predictions about your future conversion rate.
Your campaign has been receiving conversions at a similar rate for at least a few days.
Your campaign targets the Search Network, the Display Network, or both.
CPA (cost-per-acquisition) bidding is an advanced option that lets you bid directly for conversions.
Your campaign must meet a few requirements in order to be eligible to use CPA bidding:
They also recommend what:
Your campaign has been using conversion tracking for at least two weeks. The AdWords system relies on historical conversion data, so the longer conversion tracking has been running, the more data the system has and the better job it can do optimizing your ROI. If your campaign receives low traffic, we suggest running conversion tracking even longer before trying CPA bidding.
Your campaign is direct-response oriented. For example, the campaign focuses on generating sign-ups or sales on an e-commerce website.
Your campaign has a single well-defined conversion type, such as a completed purchase or sign-up.
Your campaign has a relatively stable conversion rate, with no major changes (such as redefining the conversion event or moving the conversion tracking code) within the last two weeks.
Once you’ve identified which keywords, locations, times, and devices are getting good results, you can adjust your bids accordingly. For instance, if a keyword has a low average CPC but each click converts well, you may try
increasing its max. CPC bid.
If a keyword has a high average CPC but clicks seldom result in conversions, you may try
try reducing its max. CPC bid.
CPC bid is likely to decrease your ad’s average position for that keyword, the number of impressions and clicks it receives, and, as a result, its cost. Not only can this strategy improve your ROI on low-performing keywords, but it frees up part of your budget to invest in more valuable keywords.
A couple things to keep in mind when thinking about bidding changes:
We recommend changing your bids in small increments, then see how many clicks and conversions your keywords begin to accrue before editing again. Also, remember that Internet traffic is always changing, so it’s important to re-evaluate your bids regularly.
It’s possible to improve your ad’s position by improving the quality of your ads, keywords, and website, without increasing costs. The higher the Quality Score for your keyword, the less you pay for a given ad position, and vice versa.
Bidding tips and for the display network
Clickthrough rates are often lower on the Display Network, because it can be
be harder to get a reader’s attention.
Bidding tips and for the display network
If you’re showing your ad on the Display Network, you can set a Display Network Max.
Max. CPC bid for clicks that happen just on the Display Network.
Bidding tips and for the display network
Similar to how you would evaluate keywords, if your ads perform well on certain placements, you can consider raising the
the bid for those placements.
Bidding tips and for the display network
Instead of paying per click, you can pay by the number of times your ad is shown. That’s called
cost-per-thousand impressions (CPM) bidding, since you pay for every 1,000 times your ad appears.
Tools for custom bid estimates
What are the tools for custom bid estimates
- Bid Simulator
- First Page Bid Estimates
- Opportunities tab
The regular Bid Simulator allows you to estimate the
clicks, costs, impressions, conversions, and conversion value your ads would have received if you had used a different max. CPC bid for your keyword or ad group.
You can find it on the Ad groups and Keywords tabs.
What is the Bid Simulator
AdWords bid simulators help you see whether different bids could have affected your ad performance over the last seven days on the Search Network.
The Campaign Bid Simulator can be used to model and apply bid changes across your account, and display details at the
the campaign level. Find it on the Campaigns tab.
The bid simulators collect and analyze data from ad auctions on Google and the
Search Network from the last seven days, while considering information such as Quality Score, your competitors’ bids, and keyword traffic
Using bid simulator for conversion estimates
If you’re using Conversion Tracking, the simulators offer conversion estimates to help you understand the number of
conversions your ads might have received if you had set different bids.
What are some information conversion details to keep in mind?
- Conversion delays: Conversions can be reported up to 90 days after the click, depending on the conversion window you’ve chosen.
- Sparse conversion data: There is usually less conversion data than click or impression data when calculating these estimates, so conversions can be more difficult to estimate. The longer the history and the more conversions you have, the more accurate these estimates will be.
- Changes to Conversion Tracking: Removing or moving the Conversion Tracking tag could invalidate the estimates.
- Conversion definitions: Conversions rely not only on ad clicks, but also on the actions that customers take on your site. This can also make them more difficult to predict.
Benefits of using bid simulator?
You can view bid changes in aggregate and model changes even when keywords or ad groups might not have enough data for this on their own.
Bid scaling is available, so you can see what might happen if you increased or decreased all your bids by a specific percentage (10%, for example).
Because campaign-level bid changes can increase traffic significantly, we’ll tell you whether you need to increase your budget and, if so, what to change it to.
You can model what happens if you changed all your bids in the campaign to a fixed value. If you choose to apply one of these campaign-wide bid changes, your ad group default bids will be changed to this fixed value, and your keyword-level bids will be erased.
You can download the bid simulation data at the account or campaign level.
You can download an AdWords Editor-compatible file with the bid amounts to which ad groups and keywords must be set.
Cost-per-acquisition (CPA) bidding
Cost-per-acquisition (CPA) bidding is a bidding method that lets you tell AdWords the amount you’re
willing to pay for a conversion.
