Table of Content
Introduction
Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is a strategy that allows businesses to get the most out of their marketing budget by capturing leads quickly and efficiently.
With PPC advertising, your target market raises their hand to say that they are interested in your product. They do this by typing specific search terms in the search engine. The beauty about it is that instead of you having to go out and look for your customers/potential customers, they readily come to you. As such, PPC is a form of inbound marketing.
This guide is about the different PPC bidding strategies that you can use to optimize your Google Ad campaigns without spending more than you should get the kind of results that you hope for.
PPC Goals and Bidding Strategies
One of the critical things to do before deciding on the best PPC bidding strategy is to understand precisely what you are trying to accomplish through your PPC advertising campaign. In short, setting clear objectives for your PPC campaign will help you choose the best strategy.
The primary PPC goals that Google allows you to bid for include:
1) Conversions. The advertiser uses conversion tracking to monitor direct actions that the customer takes on the website. Smart bidding is the best strategy here. The four Smart Bidding strategies include:
- Target Cost-Per-Acquisition/Action (CPA). To increase conversions while targeting a specific acquisition, e.g. clicks, sales, form submissions, etc.
- Target Return-On-Ad-Spend (ROAS): Optimize conversions for every dollar spent on an Ad source
- Maximize Conversions: This allows the advertiser to optimize their entire budget on conversions instead of targeting a particular CPA.
- Enhanced Cost-Per-Click (ECPC): Automatically adjust manual bids to maximize conversions. This is a feature that you can choose with manual CPC bidding.
2) Traffic generation: The advertiser focuses on clicks to their website. A Cost-per-click (CPC) bidding strategy is the ideal strategy where the advertiser only pays for clicks.
3) Brand awareness. The advertiser focuses on impressions (each time an Ad is shown on the Google Network). The different strategies that can be used here include:
- vCPM (cost per thousand viewable impressions) bidding strategy for visibility
- Target Search Page Location (TSPL) automatic bidding strategy to maximize visibility by allowing Google to adjust bids to always show at the top of the search page or on the first page results
Target Outranking Share automatic bidding strategy to maximize visibility by allowing Google to adjust bids based on competition. Google will increase the advertiser’s bids to outrank competitor Ads.
4) Increase interactions or views using video Ads. The bidding strategies to use here include:
- Cost-Per-View (CPV). The advertiser sets the amount to pay for video views or interactions (e.g. clicks on CTAs, cards, overlays, and banners)
- Cost per Mille/Cost-Per-Thousand (CPM). The advertiser pays for each set of a thousand video views
5) Increase product/brand consideration for videos. You can use the CPV (cost-per-view) bidding strategy
Over to you
There are several PPC advertising bidding strategies that you can use depending on your goals and budget. The most efficient bidding strategy that will draw in the most leads while at the same time optimizing your budget. It is imperative that you test and measure what works best for you.
