What is AdWords Smart Bidding?

Let the machines take over…

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It has been an ongoing debate amongst digital marketing agencies: Do you use Google smart bidding as part of your PPC management? Many of us are still reluctant to relinquish control over to the Google gods. But as more success stories arise, we look into the benefits of AdWords smart bidding.

How does smart bidding work?

Rather than spending time evaluating the value of each keyword manually, automated bidding uses machine learning to optimise your bids for you. There are six automated bid strategies to help you achieve different business goals:

Maximise Clicks – Bids are set to receive the highest number of clicks within your budget. A good option if you want more web visitors.

Enhanced cost per click (ECPC) – This method automatically adjusts your manual bids to gain more conversions. Many PPC agencies like this option as they still retain some level of control of the manual bidding.

Target Search Page Location – This sets your bids to show your ads at the top of search page results (or at least on the first page!). This could be beneficial for companies with lots of strong competitors.

Target Outranking Share – This smart bidding method is really sneaky! Here, you enter your competitor’s domain and Google will optimise your bids to outrank it.

Target ROAS – Increases your conversion value at your target return on ad spend.

Target CPA – Google sets bids to help you achieve as many conversions at your set target cost per acquisition. This is good option for campaigns that regularly get over 30 conversions per month.

Maximise Conversions – Similar to Target CPA, this option optimises bids for conversions but while spending your budget. We recommend this one only for the brave!
Not sure which AdWords smart bidding strategy is right for your company? Contact our Upperdog specialists to offer you a free PPC audit.

adwords-automatic-bidding ppc management

Smart Bidding Experiments

Before you get too excited, take care to introduce any changes to your AdWords management slowly. If you are unsure, start with an AdWords experiment. This allows you to copy your current campaign and make changes without affecting the original.
Simply create a draft campaign, select your bidding strategy and choose how long you want to run it for. Most PPC agencies suggest allowing your experiment to run for a least a month to gather any significant data. You can also assign what percentage of the budget you would like to allocate to the draft. Once you are reassured the smart bidding works for you, you can apply it to the original campaign.

If you want to find out more about our PPC services or SEO services, get in touch with the Upperdog team today on 01202 798 820 or email us at hello@upperdog.co.uk.