When you put money into something, you want good returns. That’s a pretty basic expectation. So, every dollar you spend should count when you put money into online ads. Online ads require a plan, though, like someone directing a show. For this reason, companies use PPC bidding strategies that help people manage the otherwise vast and fairly confusing domain of digital advertising.
Great PPC campaigns are based on the right bidding strategy. They can decide if you’re “just spending” money or “truly investing” it well to gain favorable returns. Once you allocate an ad spend, you must ensure its practical use. Let’s find out how.
If you don’t know the rules, every activity feels overwhelming. Running pay-per-click ads is no different. You should know the basics. You begin by setting a budget and selecting your keywords. But what do you do after that? You cannot just “hope” that your plan clicks.
Every marketer needs a brilliant plan to manage their PPC bids. Knowing how bidding strategies work is crucial here. They help you outline your needs and set your goals. Once you reach this stage, you’re all set to maximize your ad spend.
A bidding strategy means telling platforms like Google Ads, Meta Ads, or Microsoft Ads how you want to advertise online and how much you want to pay for these ads to reach your goals.
The common goals are clicks, leads, conversions, and impressions. Different bidding strategies are used for different outcomes. When you choose the right strategy, you typically get the following results:
Do you know that Google Ads is the most popular platform for PPC marketing? It has a 69.04% share of the PPC market!
Some PPC bidding strategies give you complete control, while others rely on Google’s algorithm. With the right bidding strategy, you can get into the driver’s seat, irrespective of whether you use the manual driving stick shift or cruise control.
Let’s see the types of bidding strategies to understand this better.
Manual CPC bidding means you’re in the driver’s seat because you decide how much you want to pay for each keyword click. This works well for tight bid management involving high-value keywords. However, it’s time-consuming, and your plan cannot be easily scaled. This means it’s suitable for relatively minor ad campaigns.
It is a good strategy when you’re just testing the waters with your company’s offerings, like e-commerce marketing services.
Enhanced CPC involves Google tweaking your bids to adjust them and increase the chances of conversions. This means you are the decision-maker, with some help from Google. It works for those testing conversion data and need some support.
Such automation can be categorized as smart bidding strategies when moving from manual bidding.
Maximizing clicks means getting as many clicks as possible for the allocated budget. It’s a simple strategy that can work wonders when a new product or service is launched. Use this PPC strategy to reach a broad audience.
Tracking bid performance is necessary to see how well your plan worked. This is a suitable plan for promoting Shopify marketing services.
Target CPA allows you to set a desired cost per acquisition. Google adjusts the bid to help you secure as many conversions as possible at the set price.
You determine how much you’re willing to pay per lead, and Google adjusts accordingly. Isn’t that neat? However, Google’s algorithm may take time to train and fully execute your plan.
It works well for campaigns focused on lead generation, particularly when even a single lead is worth a lot of money! Agencies offering healthcare PPC services frequently use this strategy.
Target ROAs (Return on Ad Spend) refer to spending on ads with a target return in mind. It means you define the revenue you want to earn against every dollar spent.
This strategy greatly values the expected or anticipated conversion value per dollar. Such a PPC bid is usually part of e-commerce PPC services.
Maximizing conversions means allowing Google to take the reins and automatically setting bids to drive the maximum conversions possible for your campaign budget.
This PPC strategy works best when you are sure Google will meet your needs without deviating from your goals. It’s an excellent way to manage campaigns where volume is the goal. That’s why a SaaS PPC agency relies on this idea.
Maximizing conversion value refers to getting high-value conversions through premium signups, large orders, etc. This PPC strategy focuses on revenue growth, so companies selling products in different tiers or grades find it useful.
For instance, using Shopify PPC services during seasonal sales can help you gain massive conversions. This strategy goes above and beyond the regular effort made as part of the maximize conversions strategy.
Target Impression Share (TIS) allows you to show your ads on search engine results pages as often as your target requires. Naturally, this is great for brand visibility, especially in competitive markets.
A downside that we must mention is that it requires consistent monitoring and management. If you like a passive approach, this is not your strategy because costs can increase rapidly and get out of control.
PPC bidding requires advertisers to bid on specific keywords to promote their products and services by directly displaying them in search results.
But do you know who the boss is when it comes to making your PPC bidding strategies work? Google Ads makes all the decisions based on logic and relevance, along with a bit of math.
Choose the most relevant keywords for your products or services and set your maximum price per click. This will be a manual process if you’ve chosen a manual PPC bidding strategy. If not, Google will do it for you.
It gets interesting at the auction stage. When someone searches for a product or service, Google conducts an auction quickly (like, really quickly). Your PPC bid and ad relevance are crucial when this happens.
They determine where your ad appears in the search results. Does that mean the highest PPC bid will win? No, the overall experience matters here, including the page experience. A bad page experience won’t impress Google despite a big wallet.
Cost calculation is vital because you cannot beat every advertiser who bids. You only need to offer enough to win against the advertiser queueing up after you. That’s why you must monitor bid performance continuously to stay in the game.
Every strategy needs performance monitoring. In the case of PPC, bid adjustments are vital to controlling costs and ensuring ad relevance. You benefit from:
A good PPC manager should never underestimate the power of effective bid management.
Choosing the right bidding strategy for PPC ad campaigns means picking the right weapons for the PPC battle. Here’s what you can consider doing:
| Campaign Goal | Recommended Strategy |
|---|---|
| Brand awareness | Target Impression Share (TIS) |
| Website traffic | Maximize Clicks |
| Sales revenue | Target ROAs or Maximize Conversion Value |
| Leads | Target CPA or Maximize Conversions |
By choosing something that “sounds advanced or useful”, you could end up choosing the wrong bidding strategy. To avoid this:
For instance, small online businesses using Shopify PPC campaigns should ideally opt for manual bidding.
You can try manual bidding if you’re fully conversant with PPC bidding strategies and the opportunities and problems each strategy brings. Go for automated bidding if you need data at every step.
Maximizing clicks gets you more visits, while maximizing conversions means you want people to focus on signups, purchases, etc. Aligning your strategy based on your definition of success (for your business and its PPC campaigns) is ideal.
Use manual bidding when you’re testing or experimenting with PPC ads. If you want to run small PPC campaigns, consider manual bidding. Since managing large PPC campaigns where multiple variables need attention, you should opt for automated bidding strategies. Automated bidding is also valuable when you want to scale your business or optimize your campaigns based mainly on data.
Running PPC ads without a good bidding strategy is pointless in many ways. You’ll likely reach some destination with this approach, but after wasting a lot of time and money. If you don’t know your goals, even a budget of a million dollars might not be able to give you good results. The right PPC bid management plan is necessary for anyone handling online advertising.
Read about manual CPC bidding and other strategies, like target ROAs, in depth before selecting one for your PPC campaign. Then, follow the conversion data and see where it takes you. Planned bidding is smart bidding.