Google Ads Bid Strategies – Which One To Choose For New Campaigns

2 months ago

Google Ads Bid Strategies – Which One To Choose For New Campaigns

Google Ads bid strategies for either a new campaign or a brand new ad account. If you choose the wrong bid strategy, here’s what can happen.

As you can see here, it’s a pretty new campaign. And if we look at this average CPC column,

you can see for one particular ad group, it’s almost $90, $43, and $40. So choosing the wrong bid strategy can have a really big impact on how much you spend, and also the results that you get.

In this article, I’m going to walk you through which bid strategy you should use for a new campaign, or a brand new ad account.

If you’re setting up a new campaign or creating a new Google Ad Account from scratch, when you start creating your campaign, it will prompt you to choose a bid strategy.

The default setting for most of the campaign types, depending on what your objective is, is to maximize conversion bid strategy. But you need to understand all the different bid strategy options first, before you choose.

And generally speaking, they’re kind of broken down into two distinct categories. The first category is manual bidding where you, as an advertiser, are manually selecting your upper bid limit of what you’re willing to spend on a cost per click.

The other type of bid strategy are Google’s automated bid strategies where you don’t select that Google decides what to bid based on all their data points.

Now, the mistake that people make is they choose the default setting, which as I said, is usually to maximize conversions or one of these automated bid strategies, when their ad account kind of has very little data, or hasn’t even set up the tracking so that they can capture that data.

Generally speaking, an ad account needs to get about 30 conversions in a 30 day period. In order for Google to have enough data to be successful with its automated bid strategies.

if you have a look in the ad account,

you’ll see that the red line is conversions, they get some conversions, but not a huge amount in terms of quantity.

You’ll see they get about 10 conversions a month.

Now for this particular ad account, that doesn’t matter. A lead is worth hundreds of 1000s of dollars for them, so they don’t mind. But I need to be very wary about using automated bid strategies for this account, because there’s limited data going through it.

And if I show you what happens when you don’t have enough data, you’ll see here in this campaign where we were testing maximizing conversions, and the average CPC went absolutely bonkers.

That is way way too high, we definitely do not want to or need to spend $90 on a cost per click. And this is the problem in choosing the wrong bid strategy when you have a brand new account.

So if you have a brand new Google Ad Account, please set up conversion tracking for your account. Often there are more than one type of conversion tracking we recommend implementing depending what kind of business you have.

But for most kinds of local type businesses or lead generation businesses, you’ll want to track the phone calls, people who come to your website and then click on the phone number. So they are two different things, because that’s the phone calls from the ad.

And the third type is the people filling in the contact form. Here is the conversion tracking section inside your Google Ad Account. I got here by going to Tools and settings, measurement and conversions.

And we click on new conversion action.

There are really four different ways you can set up conversion tracking, you can track the actions on your website, and your app, the phone calls and import.

So if you have your goals set up in Google Analytics 4, you can just simply import your goals or events, or your conversions as per the terminology and GA for into your Google Ad Account. And they can be your conversion events.

As mentioned, if you’re creating a new campaign, which is in a pretty new Google Ad Account, you’re not going to want to choose the default bid strategy, you’re going to want to in my advice, and in my experience, I like to choose manual CPC bidding first, get enough conversion data, hopefully 30 conversions in that 30 day period. Before then graduating to the automated bid strategies.

I’m going to show you how you can do that. So here I am in the settings of one of my particular campaigns, and I go to the bidding section:

change bid strategy, scroll down a bit further, I want to select a bid strategy directly.

And then here, these are all these different bid strategies, which I was mentioning. So that’s the manual CPC bidding.

And then these are really the four main types of the automated bid strategies maximize clicks, obviously helps you set bids to get the most clicks within your budget. I’m not a massive fan of this one, because it’s not conversion objective focused, it doesn’t have my goal in mind in how its bidding. So I’m all about getting leads rather than traffic for the sake of traffic.

Maximize conversions is usually my favorite bid strategy. But as you saw before, it can go a little bit crazy.

So if I click this one,

I often like to select a target cost per acquisition, which is a target, you know how much I’m willing to spend to acquire a lead. And then let’s say I set this to be $50. And that is what becomes my bid strategy.

There’s also maximize conversion value. That’s really just for E-commerce people where you’re sort of ROAS focused.

And then target impression share, you set how much impression share you want to capture, and it will be appropriately for that. If we didn’t want to do manual CPC bidding, we could choose that.

And then it’s going to ask us if we want to increase conversions with enhanced CPC, which has kind of given Google permission to go above our Max CPC?

I’ll leave this checked, checked for now to suit and make sure Google doesn’t go crazy with the CPC. If it does, well, then I will not select that.

I’ll show you another Google Ad Account where it’s actually working really well.

As you can see, it’s a really well established account, it gets leads consistently every day.

You’ll see it gets 79 conversions in a 30 day period. So there’s ample data that is going through this ad account.

And so therefore, if I scroll across real real quick, you’ll see that you know, we’re running maximize conversion bid strategy, not for all of the campaigns, but for a lot of them like a lot of the main ones essentially, and our CPCs are not going completely crazy.

So for new accounts, particularly do not do Google’s automated bid strategies, because you’ll find your CPCs can go a little bit crazy. For new accounts, my recommendation is to start with manual CPC bidding. And for new campaigns you could try straight going to the automated bid strategies provided your Google Ad Account has significant data and an account history. So really, Google kind of knows.