Bidding for paid ads is becoming increasingly necessary to improve your paid search marketing. But before you get started, it’s a good idea to learn what bids are and how bidding for paid ads works. A bid is what you’re willing to spend to get a click on one of your ads. Your Ad Rank will be calculated according to your bid and other factors like search context, the ad and its landing page’s Quality Score, and the auction competitiveness. Ad Rank is what Google uses to decide where your ads will show up on a page.
Types of Bidding Strategies
An experienced digital marketing agency Utah knows that there’s no best bidding strategy, only the bidding strategy that works best for your business’s goals. In paid advertising, several bidding strategies can help you achieve different goals. Here are some common types:
● Manual bidding allows you to set your maximum bid amount for each click so you control how much you’re willing to pay per click.
● Automated bidding maximizes clicks, conversions, and conversion value.
● Targeting bids target cost-per-acquisition and the return on ad spend.
Best Practices for Bidding Strategies
Tracking your conversions correctly is a critical part of building a winning bidding strategy. The easiest way to check the health of your conversion tracking is in Google Ads. There your conversions will be listed along with a tracking status. You’ll see one of five statuses:
● Unverified means that Google hasn’t verified your tag yet.
● No recent conversions means that your tracking is verified, and Google hasn’t recorded any conversions in the last seven days.
● Recording conversions means conversions have been recorded in the last seven days.
● Tag inactive means Google is no longer finding your tag.
● Removed means that the conversion has been cleared.
It’s also important to align your bidding strategy to your goals. Keep in mind that your goals need to be realistic and attainable. If you’re looking for more traffic, you’ll need a different strategy than if you’re trying to convert as many searchers as possible. To determine which bidding strategy is best for your goals you can conduct some A/B testing by running one strategy for a few months and then running another strategy with different goals for a few months to see which is yielding better results and to inform further testing. And don’t make too many adjustments to your ad campaigns, Google needs time to optimize them.
How Much to Bid
The rule for bidding is fairly simple: Don’t bid more than you can afford. A general approach is to start with a conservative bid and monitor performance. For example, you might begin with the suggested bid range provided by the platform and adjust based on the results you see. Regularly reviewing and tweaking your bids based on performance data will help optimize your spending and results. If you’re paying $5 per click and each click is only netting you $10, this is not a sustainable budget. Even if you are getting an increase in clicks and conversions, ads are only a small portion of your overhead costs. You want your bid to be competitive, but not at the expense of your ROI.
Choosing the right strategy and how much you bid depends on your goals (e.g., clicks, conversions, impressions), budget, and the platform you’re using. Often, testing different strategies and analyzing their performance helps in finding the best approach for your specific needs.
