Choosing the right bidding strategy in your google search ads campaign is critical to driving your ad costs down.

If you don’t have the right strategy in place or know how to adjust your bids accordingly, consequently, this will drive your ads costs up.

In this next chapter of Learn Search with Amelia, I will guide you through the different bidding strategies (both manual and automated), so you have a better understanding on the different types and what you can implement into your google search ads campaign.

The question: should you use an automated or manual bidding strategy?

Most first time users will go with automated bidding as it is easy and google will do the work for you. It’s a good starting point, however, does not work for everyone. And if you’re running multiple campaigns, constantly adjusting bids can be a lot.

This type of bidding strategy is best for optimizing your conversions. The algorithm google takes on with this strategy is to try and convert users at a specific acquisition cost, one of which you set. Google automatically sets your bids on each campaign based on your CPA.

Cost of acquisition is defined as the amount of money you can afford to spend to acquire one customer.

Another conversion based strategy is Target Return on Ad Spend. Google sets your bids to maximize conversion value based on the return you want from your ad spend. It is solely percentage based.

ROAS is calculated the following way: Sales ÷ Ad Spend X 100%

For example: $15 in sales from a campaign ÷ $5 ad spend (clicks) X 100% = 300% target ROAS

One of the simplest bidding strategies is maximize conversions. Like the other strategies discussed so far, this type of strategy is good for tracking conversions. With your daily budget set, google will automatically run your bidding for you to get the most conversions for your set budget.

For example, if your budget is $75, google will spend it wisely to get the most out of your conversions, however, if a single conversion costs $75, google won’t bid on it for you.

Tip: Be sure you are setting your daily budget to a reasonable amount that you are willing to spend!

In this bidding strategy, google decreases or increases your bids based on the likelihood of a conversion. Your bids will try to be averaged out to your max CPC settings.

If a search is highly competitive and expensive, google can lower your bid cost due to the decreased chances of converting. If google feels you have a high chance of converting, they will increase your bids.

Maximize clicks is an automated bidding strategy that is based on your max daily budget. Google will try to drive the most clicks possible within that given budget.

A more complicated bidding strategy that gives you more control over your ad spend is manual cpc. With this strategy, you spend more time monitoring your costs and adjusting your bids accordingly. As well, you are able to set bids for different ad groups.

It gives you the full control to adjust certain ad groups/campaigns bids if one is performing better than the other and vice versa – if a campaign is performing poorly you can decrease bids to get the most out of the better performing campaigns.

It’s important to note that this kind of bidding strategy is more advanced and not recommended to new users of google search advertising.

Finally, this strategy can be combined with Enhanced Cost Per Click (ECPC) so that google can adjust bids based on the likelihood of converting and it helps with manually controlling your budget.

In this bidding strategy, Google will automatically adjust bids to either show ads: a) on the first page results of google or b) at the top of the first page of google. Although this can’t be guaranteed, if your quality scores are high, there should be no problem in the placement of your ads.

Check out how to set up your first ad groups and ads, so that you can use this bidding strategy with no problem!

If you want to compete for an advertising spot to outperform your competitors, this bidding strategy is right for you. With this strategy you are able to pick specific competitors or websites you want to outrank. When you and your competitors ads are both showing, google will automatically increase your bids to outrank their ads.

As well, google will also show your ads when your competitors ads are not showing for better brand awareness. Like previous bidding strategies mentioned, target outranking share is percentage based. For example, if you choose 70% that means you would want to outrank your competitor 7/10 times.

However, it is important to be aware that the higher the percentage, the higher you most likely will pay per click due to increased bid costs.

This strategy is one of my favorites, and one of which I currently use in my google ads campaigns at Adacado!

Target impression share bidding focuses on brand awareness and helping you reach as many people as possible. Like target outranking share, this strategy is percentage based and costs can build up fast if you want your ads to show up 100% of the time.

For example, if you want your ads to show for a certain search 100% of the time, your impression share would be at 100%.

• Automated bidding is the simplest and easiest way to start
• There are different bidding strategies for different goals/purposes
• Knowing which strategy to use is crucial in maintaining your ad cost at a desirable level