We are fans here at JCK of absolutely having the most control possible when it comes to Pay Per Click management – which typically means the old fashioned process of manually checking, on a very frequent basis, how much you are paying for a click. Is it too much? or too little? And then adjusting that bid according to your own business strategy.
If you find yourself faced with this ongoing task, then flexible bid strategies might be the way forward, of course, you are handing an element of control over to Google, but it is worth consideration.
Flexible Bid Strategies
There are five different types of flexible bid strategies that you can apply to your campaigns. In fact, you can optimise your adwords performance using these strategies at campaign, adgroup and keyword level so you can make them quite granular. The five different types are
1) Maximising Clicks – This is useful if your main goal is getting traffic to your website when you have a certain budget you need to stick to. Choosing this option Google will automatically get the most clicks for the money available.
2) Target Search Page Location – Use this when you want your ad to appear higher on the SERPs.
3) Target Cost per Acquisition – This bid strategy is all about conversions. It will help you optimise your conversions whilst maintaining your average cost per acquisition goal.
4) Enhanced Cost Per Click – This strategy will increase or decrease your bid depending on the likelihood of conversion.
5) Target Return On Ad Spend – When your conversions aren’t equal, this is the strategy to use. This will maximise your conversion value.
Of course, some of these demand that you have conversions in place before you can set them up.
Flexible Bid Strategy Benefits
The main benefit here, of course, is that you know that your Adwords is working hard, even when you haven’t had the time to go and manually optimise your account. Or it might be that you just apply one of these strategies to the lesser keywords in your account while you maintain the more important ones. The key really is saving your time whilst still optimising your results.
Setting Up Flexible Bid Strategies
You’ll find the set up for these under your shared library in a drop down list. When you have chosen the one you want, you are given a few more options to give you a little more control (or you can just leave it all to Google). Once they are set up in your shared library, you can then use them across one or more of your campaigns. (or at Adgroup or keyword level) You simply need to go to the settings area to find them.
Don’t Just Set And Forget
The worry with all of these automatic rules is that we wrongly think that you can just set and forget them. That isn’t the case. You will still need to check and make sure your account is running the way you want it to. So whilst setting a flexible bid strategy might help you win back some time, you won’t get all of it back!