Introduction
You can have Google Ads bid higher for ads that serve specific business goals, such as expanding brand awareness, increasing site visits, or increasing sales. This course introduces you to the bid options you can use to help achieve certain goals.
What you’ll learn:
How bids can drive specific business outcomes
How to determine a good bidding strategy for your advertising goals
What would you do?
If you were coming up with a bidding strategy for a new Google Ads account, what factors would you consider when setting bids?
Bidding basics
Google Ads runs an auction every time it has an ad space to fill -- whether that’s on a search results page, blog, news site, etc. Each auction decides which ads will show, at that moment, and in that space.
Your bid puts you in the auction. Without a proper bid, you won’t be placed in the auction. Without being placed in the auction, your ad will not show.
Google Ads gives you several ways to bid for your ads. Depending on which networks your campaign is targeting, and whether you want to focus on getting clicks, impressions, or conversions, you can determine which strategy is best for you.
Two ways to manage your bids
There are two ways to manage your bidding in Google Ads: manual bidding and automated bidding. Manual bidding is where you control the bidding yourself. Automated, is where you let Google Ads do the heavy lifting for you. Let’s take a closer look at each and then dig in on how to pick the best strategy for your business.
Manual bidding: Manual bidding lets you manually set bids at the ad group level, for individual keywords, or for ad placements, so you know you're bidding for the clicks that mean the most to you. Imagine you run a hiking club in Vermont. You could use manual bidding to bid higher for keywords like "Vermont hiking" and a different amount for broader keywords like "hiking maps."
Automated bidding: With automated bidding you can set a daily budget and then have Google Ads automatically adjust your bids to get the most clicks or conversions possible within your budget. Let’s say you want to maximize clicks for the low-performing keywords in one of your campaigns, but don’t have time to manually manage each keyword. By adding those keywords to a portfolio and setting a target spend, you allow Google Ads to automatically maximize the bids for you!
Choose a bid amount that works for you
First things first -- there's no one recommended bid amount that works best for everyone. The right bid for you will depend on the cost of your keywords, the type of campaign you're running, and your profits.
How do I know what bid amount to set?
Most people starting out in Google Ads use cost-per-click (CPC) bidding. With this option, you set a maximum cost-per-click bid that's the highest amount you're willing to pay for a click on your ad. Set your bid by thinking about how much an ad click is worth to you. You can figure this out based on what you know about your business and the value of a sale.
For example, if you sell $5,000 diamond rings, a higher maximum cost-per-click makes more sense than if you sell $0.99 packs of gum. If you’re still unsure what bid to start with, try setting a maximum CPC bid of $1.
3 tools to determine your CPC bids:
Bid simulator runs "what-if" scenarios like, "How many more impressions would I have gotten if my bid had been $0.10 higher last week?"
Keyword Planner shows you how often some keywords get searched, and gives you cost estimates at a glance.
First-page bid estimates helps you see how much you may need to bid to put your ad on the first page of Google Search results.
Bidding for ROI
Internet traffic is always changing, so it's important to re-evaluate your CPC bids regularly. Once you've set maximum CPC amounts that you're comfortable with, see how many clicks your ads begin to accrue, and whether those clicks lead to business results on your website.
What keywords lead to the most clicks on your ads?
To see how many clicks you’re getting per keyword and how much they cost, go to the “keywords” tab in your account. Try filtering your keywords by click-through rate to see which keywords get you a lot of impressions, but few clicks. If your goal is to generate sales, these are the keywords that are probably not working so well. Adjust your bids accordingly.
How do I increase my ROI?
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. This could improve the ad’s average position for that keyword, giving your ads more exposure and potentially increasing your ROI.
Recap
In this course, you learned about the different types of bidding strategies you can use and how they align to business goals.
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