Use Your Advertising Goals to Choose Your Google Ads Bid Strategy

Choosing the right Google Ads bidding strategy to meet your advertising goals is vital to a successful Pay Per Click campaign.

Like other aspects of pay per click advertising, PPC bid strategies need careful consideration to ensure ad costs are kept to a minimum while your campaign's effectiveness remains high.

What are your advertising goals?

The first thing you need to figure out is the key aim you're hoping to achieve with your PPC campaign. That could be conversions, clicks, impressions or video views.

Conversions mean that customers are coming to your site to buy, book, or act, while clicks mean more traffic on your website. Impressions refer to the number of times your ad shows up.

For video ads, you'll want to consider whether you want to increase views or interactions with your ad or increase brand consideration and awareness. Cost Per View (CPV) bidding can work for either of these strategies, and in some cases, Cost Per Thousand (CPM) impressions bidding may work when overall views are the target.

How to automate with Smart Bidding

For some businesses, Google Ads Automated Bidding strategies can be a game-changer. Smart Bidding can allow automated bids that utilise machine learning, a form of advanced artificial intelligence, to carry out sophisticated bidding strategies and even refine them over time.

Smart Bidding can make it simple to refine your bidding strategy and keep costs low across a campaign. With Smart Bidding, you can target Cost Per Action (CPA) of your ad, as well as Return on Ad Spend (ROAS), both of which can help you to identify which ads offer good value for money.

Smart Bidding can also help you maximise conversions, maximise conversion value, and with Enhanced Cost Per Click (ECPC) can adjust your manual bids up or down based on the likelihood that a click will lead to a sale or conversion on your site.

However, it is essential to note that automated bidding options are only as good as the data going in. If you have insufficient data, then it is highly likely you will get poor results.

Looking for more control? Use Manual CPC bidding

If your goal is clicks and more control over your bids, you should be considering manual CPC bidding. Cost Per Click Bidding means you pay only when users click on your ad, making it the best model for maximising clicks without paying for anything else. Maximising clicks can often be a good bet if you are short on budget, but it does not always lead to the highest conversion rates since clicks aren't assessed for quality or intent.

Are you trying to increase visibility?

If visibility is your goal, you can use Smart Bidding tools like Target impression share to adjust your ad's visibility across a campaign.

Target impression share can help you set your target for, essentially, where your ads appear on the page on Google search results. Using Cost Per Mille (CPM), also known as Cost Per Thousand Impressions, can be an excellent way to gain views, though these won't always lead to clicks. tCPM, or Target cost per mille, can help you hit your impressions targets, while vCPM applies only to visible impressions and can help you ensure that your ad can be seen when you pay for an impression.

For video ads, CPV or Cost Per View bidding can help you maximise your bidding strategy views.

It's a lot to take in, but understanding the myriad of tools available to help you craft the best Google Ads Bid Strategy is the best way to maximise the rewards of any Google Ads campaign.

If you're looking for an experienced PPC professional to help you build a successful Google Ads campaign that enables you to hit your goals, get in touch with me, and I'll happily share my expertise with you.