What Is The Most Effective Bid Strategy in Google Ads (AdWords)?

AdWords offers two primary bid strategy categories: automatic and manual bidding. Within each are bid strategies that you choose to manage your placement in the ad auction results.

 

These bid strategies are:

Automatic:

Enhanced CPC
Target outranking share
Target CPA
Target ROAS
Maximise Clicks
Maximise Conversions
Target Search Page Location

 

Manual:
Manual bidding

 

Many advertisers struggle to find the most effective AdWords strategy. And that’s common at the beginning of a campaign and were there is little or no data to go by.

 

The most effective bid strategy will depend on your goals. And below are listed some goals that will help you pick the most effective AdWords bid strategy for your campaigns:

 

Increase Conversions

There’re a number of bid strategies that help you increase conversions. However, the strategy that was created for this goal specifically is Maximise Conversions.

 

This is an automated strategy and is easy to implement. It uses machine learning techniques to bid on searches that will lead to conversions and reduce exposure for searches that are unlikely to convert.

 

So, Maximise Conversions will only be available as a bid option when the account has been running for a while and has received conversions – usually a minimum of 15 per month.

 

That gives it enough information to determine the best searches to appear for and maximise the potential.

 

Rank Higher

Manual bidding can help you increase bids quicker to achieve higher positions. However, it’s often an inefficient and time consuming bid strategy for this purpose.

 

Instead, you can use an automated bid strategy to rank higher. One of these is Target Outranking Share and you can focus on one competitor to outrank – especially the highest ranked one.

 

Another effective one is Target Search Page Location and you can choose the option to target the first results page. This strategy is often effective but can be difficult to achieve if competition is high.

 

 

 

Increase Clicks

The most effective bid strategy to increase clicks is Maximise Clicks. It’s aim is to get you as many clicks as possible for your budget.

 

So, if you set a budget of £50 per day for example, AdWords will bid for the positions that will get you the most clicks. However, there’s an option to put a bid cap to ensure the Cost Per Click (CPC) doesn’t go higher than a certain amount. But that’s not always advisable, as AdWords will try to get you as many clicks as possible.

 

 

 

Another effective bidding option to increase clicks is Manual Bidding. It allows you to change bids manually and you can bid higher to get more clicks or reduce bids if your budget is limited and you want to get more traffic

 

Reduce CPC Rate

If you run shopping or search campaigns, CPC rates can at times be high. And reducing the rates can help boost profitability and reduce costs.

 

If you’re not working with many keywords or products, then manual bidding could be the most effective bid strategy here. You can easily reduce bids manually if they’re too high. And you can do that at the keyword level.

 

Also, if you find that a device type or location is not performing well, you can use bid modifiers. With bid modifiers, you reduce all bids for that device or location by a certain page. For example, if mobile is underperforming, you can reduce bids by 25%.

 

 

Increase Profitability

To increase profitability you can use one of the conversion bid types. One of these is Target Cost Per Acquisition (CPA), which sets a limit on how much you want to spend for each conversion.

 

So, you can control costs and also increase profitability by working on what you are willing to spend for a conversion. This is an automated bid strategy and frees up much of your time as it does the heavy lifting.