Google Ads offers several bid strategies tailored to different types of campaigns. Depending on which networks your campaign is targeting and whether you want to focus on getting clicks, impressions, conversions, or views, you can determine which strategy is best for you.
Each bid strategy is suited for different kinds of campaigns and advertising goals. For bidding, you’ll want to consider five basic types of goals, along with your current campaign settings.
If you want customers to take direct action on your site and use conversion tracking, then it may be best to focus on conversions, and smart bidding lets you do that.
Focusing on clicks could be ideal for you if you want to generate traffic to your website. Cost-per-click (CPC) bidding may be suitable for your campaign.
If you want to increase brand awareness, focusing on impressions maybe your strategy. You can use cost-per-thousand viewable impressions (vCPM) bidding to put your message in front of customers.
If you run video ads and want to increase views or interactions with your ads, you can use cost-per-view (CPV) or cost-per-thousand-impressions (CPM) bidding.
If you run video ads and aim to increase product or brand consideration, you can use cost per view (CPV).
If you want to focus on conversions, consider using Smart Bidding to take much of the heavy lifting and guesswork out of setting bids. Smart bidding is a set of automated bid strategies that use machine learning to optimize conversions or conversion value in each and every auction — a feature known as “auction-time bidding.” It also factors in a wide range of auction-time signals such as device, location, time of day, language, and operating system to capture the unique context of every search.
Below are Smart Bidding strategies you can use:
Target cost per action (CPA): If you want to optimize conversions, you can use Target CPA to help increase conversions while targeting a specific cost per action (CPA).
Target return on ad spend (ROAS): If you want to optimize conversion value, you can use Target ROAS to help increase conversion value while targeting a specific return on ad spend (ROAS).
Maximize Conversions: If you want to optimize for conversions but just want to spend your entire budget instead of targeting a specific CPA, you can use Maximize Conversions.
Maximize Conversion Value: If you want to optimize for conversion value but just want to spend your entire budget instead of targeting a specific ROAS, you can use Maximize Conversion Value.
Enhanced cost per click (eCPC): If you want to adjust your manual bids to maximize conversions automatically, you can use ECPC. It’s an optional feature you can use with Manual CPC bidding.
If you’re focusing on gaining clicks to generate traffic to your website, there are two cost-per-click bid strategies to consider.
Maximize Clicks: This is an automated bid strategy, and it’s the simplest way to bid for clicks. All you have to do is set an average daily budget, and the Google Ads system automatically manages your bids to bring you the most clicks within your budget.
Manual CPC bidding: This lets you manage your maximum CPC bids yourself. You can set bids for each ad group in your campaign or individual keywords or placements. If you’ve found that certain keywords or placements are more profitable, you can use manual bidding to allocate more of your advertising budget to those keywords or placements.
If you want to focus on visibility, you can try one of the following bid strategies to help maximize visibility:
Target Impression Share: automatically sets bids with the goal of showing your ad on the absolute top of the page, on the top of the page, or anywhere on the page of Google search results.
CPM: A bidding strategy where you set an average for how much you’re willing to pay for every thousand impressions. It optimizes bids to maximize your campaign’s unique reach. With target CPM, you can keep your campaign’s average CPM lower or equal to the target you set (although the cost of impressions may vary).
vCPM: This is a manual bidding strategy if your ads are designed to increase awareness but not necessarily generate clicks or traffic. It lets you set the highest amount you want to pay for each 1,000 viewable ad impressions on the Google Display Network.
CPV: If you run video ads, you can use CPV bidding. With CPV bidding, you’ll pay for video views and other video interactions, such as clicks on the call-to-action (CTA) overlay, cards, and companion banners. You just enter the highest price you want to pay for a view while setting up your TrueView video campaign.
