PPC Bid Strategies

CPC (cost per click) bidding focuses on driving traffic to a site, so it optimises for traffic only.

An enhanced CPC bidding strategy tells Google to raise your bids if it believes that you’re likely to get a conversion from this click, using historical account data.

This strategy drives traffic, without worrying about costs. If you just want to drive traffic to a site it does what it says on the tin. However, if there’s an additional goal around conversions that you’re really optimising towards, maximising clicks doesn’t always work as well for your bottom line.

This will maximise the number of conversions based on historical conversions, without worrying about costs. If you want to drive sales or contact requests or phone calls, maximising conversions is a better strategy than maximising clicks.

Over time, target CPA (cost per acquisition) bids will build upon enough conversion history data to try and optimise your ad serving and your bidding to drive conversions at a certain cost. While Maximise Conversions simply drives as many conversions as possible, target CPA does this while keeping the cost per acquisition/conversion into consideration.

For e-commerce sites, Target ROAS (return on ad spend) is another PPC bidding strategy option. These campaign bidding strategies work towards how many sales/how much profit you expect to get from your budget. Target ROAS (also known as TROAS) works brilliantly to maximise conversion value over time if you’ve got a very high conversion campaign – it’s definitely one worth testing.

This is an automatic bidding strategy to drive as many impressions as possible into the first position on the search engine results pages (SERPs). With this strategy, your ads simply aim to appear in the top results as often as you possibly can for your daily budget.

This is an automated competitor bidding type that tries to optimise your ads to appear higher in the search results than your competitors. Using PPC automation, it will try and beat your competitors in as many possible ways and for as many possible auctions over the day, taking into account your daily budget.

Google determines CPA based on an advertiser’s Quality Score, which is a Google Ads rating of the overall user experience delivered by your ads and landing pages. It’s affected by your expected click-through rate (CTR), ad relevance and landing page design.

You can improve your Quality Score, which will lead to lower ad spending, with better ad structure. For instance, you can use a granular keyword structure so that ad groups (SKAGs) ensure that each ad group is targeting the most relevant search terms and highest-performing keywords.

PPC ad copy should speak to the target audience and clearly communicate the product or service you’re advertising. This not only will attract more clicks but deliver a cohesive user experience that drives conversions.

Increase the effectiveness of your ad copy by tapping into your audience’s emotional triggers, such as the fear of missing out (FOMO). Focus on your unique selling points and use statistics to add credibility (e.g., how many clients you have helped). You can also use the copy to address potential objections and use Google Ad’s countdown feature to drive traffic that’s ready to make a purchase.

Improving the landing page experience can raise your quality score and lower campaign cost. Instead of your homepage or a generic product page, you should send traffic to a personalised landing page that aligns with the message, target audience and keywords of the ad group. The landing page should have benefits and offers in the ad copy to deliver a consistent user experience that’ll increase conversion.

You should eliminate distractions on the landing page, such as removing navigation and other links. Make sure the call to action (CTA) is prominently displayed and positioned close to the top of the page to minimise scrolling on mobile devices. Also, use compelling images and make sure the copy is easy to scan.

Your search term report can help you discover keywords that trigger your ad and drive traffic. Look for search terms that you have missed and add them to your list of targeted keywords. Pay special attention to long-tail keywords, which are often used by searchers who are ready to make a purchase.

In addition, you should regularly update your negative keyword list to eliminate clicks that aren’t profitable. For example, a keyword may attract customers who purchase a product that yields £63 in revenue. However, if the CPA comes out to £100 and the customers aren’t likely to return for more purchases, you could be losing money with every sale. In that case, you may not want to have the ad triggered by that specific search term.

Analyse your campaigns and see when they yield the most clicks and conversions. Google Ads allows you to customise your settings so the ads are only triggered during specific days and times. For example, a local business may run its ads only when the store is open.

You can experiment with bidding down your CPA or using ad scheduling bid modifiers to adjust the bids during different times of the day to see how much you can save on ad spend. You should monitor the results closely to make sure that lowering your bid isn’t impacting the conversion rates.

Since your conversion rate is part of the CPA formula, you can lower your CPA by increasing the number of conversions. As such, you should optimise the entire user flow that leads up to the conversion event by implementing the latest conversion rate optimization (CRO) best practices.

If the conversion event is making a purchase on your website, you need to reduce friction along the checkout process. For example, by including live chat to provide visitors with assistance when needed, offering multiple forms of payment options and using mobile-specific features such as autofill and location services to make filling out forms easier.

Google Ads offers target CPA bidding, which uses machine learning to optimise bids for each auction so advertisers can maximise conversions for their target CPA. The artificial intelligence-driven technology analyses real-time and contextual signals (e.g., device, browser, location, time of day, remarketing list, etc.) and sets bids across all campaigns to achieve an average CPA equal to a preset target.

You can find out if this approach works for you by setting a lower target CPA than before to see if you can still achieve the same result with reduced ad spend. The effectiveness of target CPA bidding varies across industries so you should monitor the campaigns’ metrics and keep the whole performance picture in perspective.

A/B testing is the key to making sure that you’re using the most effective copy for each audience segment. Set up at least 2 different ads to be tested against each other in each ad group to find out what works best. By testing consistently, you can make incremental improvements that’ll add up to significant gains.

You can test the headline copy, the description and the CTA to find out what works for your audience and what doesn’t. As with any split testing, you should change only one element at a time to yield meaningful insights.

This campaign is the most profitable of them all, as they have already engaged with your ad they will remember who you are and therefore trust you more. Run this with the right messaging and an enticing offer which will lead to making purchases and completing the funnel.

Evaluating the profitability of keywords is important to identify the future potential of your campaigns. When you pause an unprofitable ad group, you allow Google to allocate spending into the profitable ad groups which will therefore make you more profitable. This means you will not waste ad spend and that you will benefit from higher ROAS.

Before optimising, we must be able to analyse the data and understand it for what it is. Doing this will allow you to have a clear mind and the full perspective of the ad account. Thus you will be able to optimise more profoundly and make profitable key changes rather than random changes. This will give you an indication of how your campaign will perform and as you steer the account, being able to understand the nature of your account will help you immensely in the future.

Building an email list is paramount to the success of the campaigns as it will fix any leakages in your funnel. Email campaigns can be used to blast your email list and with the correct automation flows set up, you will be able to recover abandoned carts which will mean your ad spend will not go to waste. This effectively will increase the LTV of your customers whilst allowing them to come back and shop again. With the right focus, you will be able to scale the campaigns and feed offline conversions back into google thus allowing it to optimise further.

Ensuring that you have a seamless checkout process will increase conversion rates and reduce abandonment carts. This will increase your conversion action rate in your campaigns which means you will be even more profitable than before. Not only this, but you will be able to spend more to acquire a customer therefore you will be able to outbid your competitor keywords. Which means gaining most of the market share and expanding. Additionally, adding checkout timers and trust icons at the checkout will increase trust and therefore will result in impulse behaviours, resulting in maximum conversion rates.