What are Google Ads Bids Strategies & How Can We Use Them? 

Google Ads Bid Strategies – Intro 

We are all well aware of the fact that it’s a risky move to step in the ground without a game plan. Therefore it’s a smart move to go for the right path by picking the right type and solid Google ads bids strategies. 

With a good game plan we can “sail our ship to victory” by having a successful campaign or by wasting our time with zero knowledge of what we are doing. We can go crashing down and blow off our budget with some clicks. That option is in our hands! Just slight changes in our bidding strategy can help in sky rocketing the conversions. 

A question is raised every time we are launching a new campaign that what type of Google ads bids strategy would you go for: 

Automated? Or Manual? 

People mostly intend to go for “automated” rather than “manual” bidding because of the extra hassle in adjusting bids all the time and mostly they are running multiple campaigns. 

But it’s just a “bitter truth” that it’s not that easy to just go for “automated” and with a click we can cash out checks from google ad sales.    

There’s always more to a story. There are a number of different strategies available with whom we should be aware of. 

Google Ads Bids Strategies – Details

Well these are 13  bidding strategies that we can use to achieve a variety of different goals. 

1. Target CPA (Cost Per Acquisition)

Target CPA helps us by providing us more control over automated bidding. It helps to raise conversions. It’s basically a bidding strategy that helps us in setting bids to get as many conversions we can get according to cost per acquisition we set. In simple words we can say that the amount of money we can afford on obtaining a single customer. 

Its example can be quoted as:

If we select a target CPA of $20, Google ads will automatically set your bids and try to  get us maximum conversions on an average of $20.

2. Target ROAS (Return On Ad Spend)

Target ROAS also known as return on ad spend. The name speaks for itself, basically it’s  how much value we get by conversion for every we dollar spent on pay per click Ads. People often get a little bit confused when it comes to this kind of strategy. 

The reason is it requires some calculations. Unfortunately it’s a major step which often cause the marketers to run for. 

For example:

We are running a Google Ads campaign, we are aiming for 12$ for every 3$ we spent.

 To perform that calculation will use this formula:

 Sales ÷ ad spent × 100% = Target ROAS 

So end result after using this formula would be in this form:

 $12 in sales from campaign ÷ 3$ ad spend (clicks) ×  100% = 400% target ROAS             

3. Maximize Conversions

Maximize conversion is considered one of the simplest type of Google Ads Bids strategies that could be offered. Its main goal is to gain more conversion while spending your daily budget. It helps us by automatically setting bids to attract more conversion while spending our total budget for the campaign. Example:

It can be considered like a student assigned as a group leader (Google) who is given a certain budget to spend on all the classmates. He won’t be a fool to go on spending the entire budget on his one friend (conversion).  

It is suggested that to check your daily budget spent, is on a suitable level that we are willing to spend. 

4. New: Maximize Conversion Value

Maximize conversion value is one the most newly introduced bidding strategies introduced in August 2019. People often get puzzled between conversion value and maximize conversion strategies.                     

Maximize conversion value specifically focuses on metrics like net margin instead of  going after conversions like a “blind bat” regardless of price.

5. Enhanced Cost Per Click (ECPC)

Just like we talked about before, there are two types of bidding: ‘automatic’ and ‘manual’. But here’s a totally new concept: enhanced cost per click is a combo of both types.  

It’s also known as a form of smart bidding which aims to raise your Pay per click efficiency and increase your profits while automatically increasing or decreasing bids on Google Ads.

6. Maximize Clicks

Well, Maximize clicks is an automated bidding strategy. Whose sole purpose is to drive maximum number of clicks it could with the daily budget regardless of the result. 

 For Instance, we have a daily budget of 50$, we can receive a 1 click or 50 clicks a day depending on the productivity of keywords. 

 But there’s also a fact that it sometimes drives irrelevant traffic which isn’t best for sales Or other sorts of conversions. 

7. Manual CPC Bidding

This type of bidding strategy might grant you the control over your bidding but just like they say, “Everything comes with a price” and the price you gotta pay here is your Time. Because it’s a little time consuming. But on the other hand it does let you put the highest amount that you could pay for each click on your ad. 

8. CPM Bidding (Cost Per Thousand Impressions)

Well talking about CPM also known as cost per thousand impressions it uses a similar type of manual model which CPC uses. It’s mostly used when investing in display, social media ads or for brand awareness campaigns. Google display network offers ads on CPM bidding model. It’s a usual method used for posting and managing display ads. While advertisers are charged by CPM everytime an ad is shown on a user’s web browser.  

9. CPM Bidding (Cost Per Viewable Thousand Impressions)

Similar to CPM Bidding tactic Viewable CPM also known as “VCPM”, which is also a manual type of bidding and best used for advertising as display or Youtube ads. In this type of bidding model brands or businesses only pay when the ad is viewed by the user instead of paying them everytime ad is shown on the page. 

The purpose of this bidding model is to set the maximum number of viewable impressions (1k). It’s considered as viewable impressions after just seconds the display ad shows up or video is played on Youtube. 

10. CPV Bidding, (Cost Per View)

CPV also known as cost per view is solely used for video advertisements on Youtube or Google Ads. Well CPV is a method of charging on a video advertisement depending on the number of interactions or views it gets. CPV ads creates a platform for digital marketers to connect with the right audience and to build a healthy consumer  relationship and in creating brand awareness. 

People often confuse it with CPM (cost per impression) but it’s totally different. CPV cost is not charged until the viewer does not interacts with video ads directly or watches the ad up to at least a certain duration of seconds. Rather than Youtube and Google based Advertisement, another outlet known as Facebook has join the bandwagon and testing this similar model. 

11. Target Impression Share Bidding

Before starting on what target impression share bidding is? It’s first crucial to know what impression share is? 

So speaking about impression share it’s the percentage of impressions received by your ad compared to the number of total impressions your ad is eligible for. 

 It can be taken as, Impressions / total impressions eligible.

So, now we are done with what impression share is? Let’s begin with Target impression Share it’s a smart bidding, method which just not only helps in reaching out our audience but also helps as a key factor in building brand awareness. In this strategy Google helps us by automatically adjusting our bids and setting them according to our campaigns to achieve those (impression) shared goals.

 There are options available for your ad to be displayed. But depending on user preference, you can set goals to display your ad at the top of the page ,at the absolute top of page or anywhere on the page according to user search results. 

Following are two options recently made obsolete, and what bidding strategy Google Ads made to replace them with: 

12. Obsolete: Target Search Page Location

Target search page location is basically aims to display your ads at the first pages of search results or ads to reach the top of the page. 

Technically speaking in this strategy ads bids are increase and decreased automatically by Google ads to display them either on the first page or at the top of the Google search result. 

But in June 2019 this bidding strategy was removed and replaced with “Target impression share” & by adjusting your bids for campaigns to get impressions.

13. Obsolete: Target Outranking Share

Target Outranking share strategy was like an Ace card. By using it you can get your results above your competitors ads. 

Like for example: 
If we are working with a Coffee shop, we would want our shop ad to appear above our competitor Cafe x. If we know that Cafe x has a strong keyword campaign, we would obviously bid hire to outrank them. So in result when people use keywords like “Black coffee in town” our Coffee shop who has the highest bid will show at the top of results. 

But it also got removed and replaced with ‘Target impression share’ in June 2019 and is no longer useful for old or new campaigns.

Conclusion 

So when launching any sort of new campaign on Google ads, make sure to use the best strategy and bidding format because there are a lot of options to go for and it sure ain’t easy.  

A right move can set you up to sky rocketing to success and on the same hand if your not careful in making the right decision you can end up crashing down, and breaking your campaign. So,  before selecting any Google Ads Bids strategies make sure your are well aware of your goals.

But if you want more traffic on your website? Want to create brand awareness?  Need a boost in your sales?  Want to run multiple Google ad campaigns? Or your not confident in your bidding abilities then you should probably go for someone with paid advertising expertise or opt for a digital marketing agency.