Bid Management Tips

5 tips for successful bid management

1: Manage risk factors

2: Play to your strengths

3: See what’s coming down the line

4: Capture costs early

5: Gain full visibility of your pipeline

How PPC Bid Management Works

As online ad prices go up, businesses turn to PPC bid management to effectively track, analyze, and redirect ad spend to the best channels. 

The process of managing PPC bids is relatively straightforward: you get a tool that can effectively track what keywords you’re paying for, how much they cost, and what returns they bring. This tracking and comparing activity allows advertisers and marketing teams to pivot and adjust spending on keywords based on what’s working or not. 

PPC Bid Management isn’t rocket science. But it’s also a far shot from a walk in the park. Here are some practical tips and strategies when managing PPC online ads to maximize profits.

1. Be clear on your target persona

Marketers today have merged a PPC strategy with their content marketing efforts. And just like any marketing activity, a PPC strategy must have an exact audience. This practice has to be one of the first things that should happen when running paid ads. Through the power of data mining, platforms with ad opportunities like Google, Facebook, Instagram, and virtually every social media platform there allows an advertiser to direct ads to an ideal target persona.

2. Manage Keywords

A best practice that every advertiser or company must maintain is a keyword management system. When running keywords, it’s not enough to put dollars on individual bids. It’s also vital to track the performance and measure the returns of investment against ads spent.

There are several tools and software available online that can help advertisers effectively measure, track, and analyze whether a set of keyword bids are effective or not. Knowing which keywords work and which ones don’t give companies a better idea of which PPC bids will bring in the most profits per dollar spent. This approach not only increases profit maximization. It also helps lower ad costs. Why spend additionally for a long list of keywords when you can focus on a smaller set of more effective ones? Being able to manage keywords by seeing their corresponding results allows us to do that.

3. Test, test, test

Another best practice scenario in PPC bid management is using a bid management system to split test ads. The best way to decide is to run two or more variants of an ad and measure which variant provided better results. The ad could have different copies, colors, topics, or any factor that will split a message down the middle.

Split testing an ad based on the audience is another way marketers can figure out which works best. Some might even try using various content types. With video ads now accounting for more than 35% of all ad spending online, marketers are also currently trying to split test different video ad versions on certain occasions. 

4. Bid on unique long-tail keywords

Another of the more effective PPC bidding strategies available to marketers today is applying a unique long-tail keyword approach to PPC advertising. 

A long-tail keyword is a long string of words that form a memorable phrase that might have lesser searches. Unique long-tail keywords have lower search incidences, but they are also more unique, making them cheaper to bid on. Moreover, long-tail keywords often hit more targeted audiences who might find your query more useful. Going back to the rationale that PPC ads are a game of demand economics, more unique keywords will generally have lower costs per click. And since they’re cheaper and more targeted, they’re better keywords to bid on since they will provide better results at a lower price. 

Long-tail keyword research can often be a tedious task, but the returns can be quite rewarding when done right.

5. Use a bid management tool

Bid management tools are online services that allow advertisers and marketers to do more by automating tedious ad management and bid management processes. It helps marketers stay productive and focused by taking care of the measuring and redirecting so that teams can simply stay on top of strategy and creativity. Additionally, it gives marketing teams greater control. 

6. Integrate your ads with an eCommerce platform

Bid management solutions that deeply integrate with eCommerce platforms provide companies with more insight and automation when running ads. There is a wide selection of eCommerce software options listed by FinancesOnline that can integrate seamlessly and adequately with various bid management solutions and give companies smarter ways to manage, run, and measure ad spend. 

PPC advertising and eCommerce that come hand in hand make a great strategy that will put any company ahead of the curve as digital marketing and advertising go.

7. Implement a retargeting strategy

Every lead and prospect an advertisement reaches will be at varying stages in the customer journey. Some might just be getting acquainted with a brand, while others might be further up and closer to making a buying decision. Effective marketing and advertising campaigns cover all parts of the journey, including awareness, liking, preference, purchase, and repeat patronage.

About bid adjustments

A bid adjustment is a percentage increase or decrease in your bids. Bid adjustments allow you to show your ads more or less frequently based on where, when, and how people search. For example, sometimes a click is worth more to you if it comes from a smartphone, at a certain time of day, or from a specific location. You can also adjust your bids based on how your ads perform, helping to improve your return on investment (ROI). Your spending on individual clicks may vary as your bids increase or decrease according to the adjustments you’ve set, but your overall average daily budget won’t change.

In this article, you’ll learn about the different types of bid adjustments and their requirements, how multiple adjustments interact, and what options are available for different types of campaigns.

Before you begin

All bidding strategies are compatible with all campaign types. Learn more About Target CPA, Target ROAS, and Maximize clicks bidding strategies.

How bid adjustments work

Say you’ve got a campaign that performs well on mobile devices with a max CPC bid of $1 USD. To show your ad to more customers on mobile devices, you increase your bid by 20% for searches on mobile devices, resulting in a final bid amount of $1.20 USD. Here’s the math:

Starting bid: $1 USD

Mobile adjustment: $1 USD + ($1 USD x 20%) = $1.20 USD

Resulting bid for searches on mobile devices: $1.20 USD

In another example, let’s say you have a $1 USD bid and would like to decrease it. To adjust it to $0.80 USD, select Decrease by 20%.

How to view your bid adjustments

In your Google Ads account, you can view bid adjustments from the page menu on the left:

• For bid adjustments on the Search network:
  1. Click +More at the bottom of the page menu (you may have to scroll down).
  2. Click the ad type you want to view:
     • Location
     • Ad Schedule
     • Devices
     • Audiences
     • Placements
     • Advanced bid adjustment
  3. In the table, look for the column titled “Bid adjustments”.

Note: If you don’t see bid adjustments, review Bid adjustment eligibility in this article.

• For bid adjustments on the Display network:
  1. Click the ad type you want to view from the page menu:
     • Audiences
     • Topics
     • Placements
  2. In the table, look for the column titled “Bid adjustments”.

Optimize the target search page location that works for your business

The target search page location is a type of portfolio bid strategy that automates bids across multiple campaigns so your ad is displayed at the top of the page or on the first page of search results on Google.

How does it work

Google Ads automatically increases or decreases your bids to show your ad at the top of the page or on the first page of Google search results. This strategy can be used with campaigns that target only the Search Network.

When you apply this strategy for the first time, it may take a few minutes before your offer is updated. In addition, with this strategy, your offer will be updated several times a day to show your ads at your targeted location.

Make sure the strategy is applied to an active campaign, ad group, or keyword. Bidding by location on the search page is not compatible with dynamic search ads. Therefore, if the ad groups have dynamic ad targets, but do not have keyword targeting, then the strategy will be inactive. If the strategy is new, wait a few hours for the status to appear because it may take longer.

Position

There are two configuration options for the target search page location depending on whether you want to show your ad at the top of the page or on the first page of Google search results:

Top of the first page of search results: Allow Google Ads to automatically increase or decrease bids to match the estimate of bids for the top of the page. The estimated amount of the offer at the top of the page gives an approximate of the cost-per-click (CPC) bid. It might be necessary for your ad to appear at the top of the Google search results page when a search term exactly matches your keyword

Bid Automation

Bis automatically increase or decrease to match the bid estimate for the top of the page or with the first-page bid estimate. With this option, it is not necessary to configure bids manually.

Set bids manually, but adjust them automatically to at least reach the bid approximate for the top of the page or the first-page bid estimate. With this option, it will allow Google Ads to automatically increase offers when they are below the estimated value.

Optional

Bid adjustment: It can make your offer more competitive. Use it to increase or decrease your bid by a percentage of the top of the page or the first page. There are other types of bid adjustments that allow you to increase or decrease bids for mobile devices, placements, and ad scheduling, among others.

Manual Limit of the CPC bid: If you use this bid strategy, you can set a bid limit for any keyword, ad group, or campaign.

Advanced

Limited budgets: Decide if you want to increase bids in case your campaign has a limited budget. The bid increase, in this case, can generate a lower number of clicks. Consider lowering your bids, or increase your budget instead. By decreasing bids, you could reduce the average amount you pay when a user clicks on your ads, which could expand your budget and generate more clicks.

Low-quality keywords: Decide whether or not you want to increase bids for keywords with a Quality Score of less than four. Increasing bids could cause you to pay more for keywords that require improvement.

Remember to pass by our blog at Synapse Ads to learn more about how to grow your SEM within the digital marketing strategy of your company. We also offer you the Keyword Mixer which is a tool designed to help you find the right keywords to boost your website’s traffic.