Google Ads: Top 6 Bidding Strategies You Should Know in 2021
Should you go with an automated or manual approach?
It’s important to choose a bidding strategy that reflects your marketing goals. Choosing the right one is critical to driving your ad costs down.
If you don’t know what are you doing, you could end up draining your budget on just a few clicks. But when done right, you could take your campaign performance to the next level.
In this post, you’ll learn how to identify the right bidding strategy based on your marketing goals.
Awareness-based bidding strategies
You should choose this bid strategy if you want to make sure that your ad is visible for certain queries and even at certain locations on the page. Essentially, to help improve visibility of your business.
Bid strategy: Target impression share
This is a smart bidding strategy that helps make sure your ads are meeting a specific impression share threshold for a specific location on the search results page: anywhere, top of page, or absolute top of page.
Keep in mind that the % impression share is a goal and is affected not just by your bids, but also by the quality score of each individual Google ad group and ad.
Consideration-focused bidding strategies
You should choose this bid strategy if you want to drive as many clicks as possible within a set level of spend.
Bid strategy: Maximize clicks
Maximize Clicks is an automatic bidding strategy based on your maximum daily budget. Google Ads will attempt to get you as many clicks as possible within a target spend amount that you choose.
It doesn’t consider the quality or relevance of the traffic and isn’t ideal for driving sales or other conversions.
Maximize clicks is the best option if you have a very limited budget or limited search volume for the keywords (upper funnel keywords ideally) in your campaign.
Conversion-focused bidding strategies
Choose one of these bid strategies if you’re tracking actions post-click, valuing conversions equally, and looking to maximize the number of conversions.
Bid Strategy: Maximize conversions
Maximize Conversions is one of the simplest bidding strategies that Google Ads offers. Using the maximum daily budget that you set, Google will automatically run your bidding for you to get you the most conversions for your money.
You don’t need to provide a specific cost per click (CPC), cost per acquisition (CPA), or return on ad spend (ROAS) target. Ideal for advertisers that want to spend a fixed budget and don’t have an explicit CPA/ROAS goal.
Bid Strategy: Target Cost Per Acquisition (CPA)
This strategy automatically sets bids to help you increase conversions while reaching your average cost-per-acquisition goal. If driving conversions are your primary goal for the campaign, selecting Target CPA bidding will focus on trying to convert users at a specific acquisition cost.
Target CPA bidding can be complicated if you don’t know what your acquisition costs are.
Your Cost per Acquisition is simply the amount of money you can afford to spend on acquiring one customer.
For instance, if you sell a product for $10, you don’t want to set your target CPA at $10. That would be breaking even when your goal is to profit.
Bid Strategy: Enhanced cost-per-click (eCPC)
This strategy automatically adjusts your manual bid up or down based on each click’s likelihood to result in a conversion. In a other words, it’s a mix of manual and smart bidding (semi-automated if you will) and you are letting Google make the call for you in selected situations. You set the basic CPC for your ad groups and keywords, but the algorithm gets to optimize them.
Google has the right to increase or decrease your bid amount based on the likelihood of driving the sale. Bids will try to be averaged out at your max cost per click settings.
Revenue-focused bidding strategies
Choose this bid strategy if you’re tracking the revenue or value associated with your conversions and want to maximize it at a specific return on ad spend target.
They’re a good fit if you’re tracking conversion value and have campaigns that have at least 50 conversions in the past 30 days for Search and at least 15 conversions in the past 30 days for Display.
Bid Strategy: Target Return on Ad Spend (Target ROAS)
Target ROAS is the bidding strategy where Google Ads will set your bids to maximize conversion value based on the return you want from your ad spend. This number is percentage-based.
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Note: Enhanced CPC, Target CPA, Maximize Conversions, and Target ROAS fall specifically under the umbrella of Google Ads Smart Bidding.
They’re conversion-based bid strategies that leverage an exclusive set of signals to bid at auction time.
