Create a next-level PPC bidding strategy
You’ve conducted keyword research and chosen perfect keywords that are most relevant to your business. You’ve structured your campaigns and ad groups carefully and logically, and have edited your ad copies one hundred times. Now everything seems good to launch - except that you are struggling with how much to bid on campaign level, ad group level, or even individual keyword level.
How much to bid is always a tough question to answer even among the most seasoned PPC professionals. There is no one easy answer to apply to all situations. The best thing to do is always to analyze historic data, keep an eye on the trends and do testing. Here is a basic 3-step guide to help you get started.
Step 1: Aim high
Bid high when new campaigns are just launched; at least go above suggested first page bids for all keywords. The benefits are twofold. First, quality score depends on relevancy, landing page experience, and most importantly, expected click-through rate. With CTR closely related to the position of ads, bidding high at first might help improve the CTR and thus help boost quality scores when your new keywords do not have much historic data.
Secondly, bidding high when new campaigns are just launched helps ads get clicks more quickly and accelerated data collection process. After some conversion data is collected, you can get started with data analysis and move on to a more scientific bidding method, which is what Step 2 is about.
Step 2: Optimize like the pros
Use conversion data to optimize your bids. A common formula lots of advertisers use to decide how much to bid is:
[Revenue/Click] ÷ [Target ROAS]
Using that formula, you can have a general idea of how much you can pay for a click in order to achieve your ROAS. For lead generation, you can use another formula:
[Conversion Rate] x [Target Cost/Conversion]
Step 3: Adjust and readjust
The formulas mentioned in Step 2 serve as a scientific method for you to decide how much you want to bid in order to achieve the profits you want based on data collected. However, that does not mean you can just calculate a bid, use it and never do anything about it again. After you use those bids you calculated, let the campaigns run for a while and review the data on a regular basis.
Tweak your bids constantly as needed since metrics may change with seasonality, markets, competition and hundreds of other factors. Remember, the best way to manage a PPC campaign is always to do testing and analysis.
To ensure you're on the right track, work with a PPC agency with over 2 decades of eCommerce experience... a PPC agency like BlueSwitch
