Decoding Ppc Bid Management: An In Depth Overview Of Ppc Bid Management System

As keyword is an important element of conversion, bids are also part of this system that produce conversions. A good strategy of bidding at irrelevant keywords can create a major set back in your account quality score. Even if such bidding can get click, but it will never be able to convert them.

In case if you have relevant keyword but it is not producing result as expected, consider changing the strategy for your bid rather than forgoing the keyword completely. Bid management is the core activity needed to meet the demand of the target in a PPC campaign. 

The goal of bid management

There are major four goals for that advertisers wants to achieve by ppc campaign

• Efforts to increase the branding by driving impressions under targeted CPM.
• Enhance the traffic of the site while staying under targeted CPC.
• Increase leads by driving maximum conversions while staying below CPA 
• Increase sale by increasing conversions with positive ROI.

Each of the goals are meant to be backed by a different bidding strategy. One can also mix the goals. But one cannot have multiple goals for one item as different strategies might work against each other. 

Moving ahead…

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• Choosing a lookback window for bid management

After the goal is defined, the next step is what look back window should be used. If you look at date range which is extremely short, it will end up setting aggressive changes in performance that may not be a helpful signal in long term trends.

If the look back window is long, the bid changes become too consecutive and take a long to address recent changes in users behaviour. The easiest way to tackle this situation is using multiple lookback window. For example, if a keyword has done consistently well for six months but last few weeks it is not performing that well. The strategy in this regrading will be entirely different from the situation where the keyword is poorly performing from a long period of time.

In the first situation, quite clearly something has gone wrong which needs a quick makeover while in the second situation lowering the bid is extremely easy solution for the remedy of the situation. 

1. One important consideration when looking back at lookback window is, one should ideally look at the performance of date range during which bids were changed. Like if you make a bid and evaluate the performance in the next 7 days, chances are your statistics may vary considerably. This means that you may mistakenly bid high or low due to the changing metrics.  The best way is analysing the performance from the bid was changed and then make comparison from the past situation when the bid was not changed. The process is extremely difficult manually but automated bid management system can solve this problem of evaluation.

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• Managing the bid with the help of little data

A good amount of small ad groups that own a tight bond of keywords and the ads normally improve the quality score of the account. This kind of arrangement spread metrics across various many entities that it gets difficult to manage data for evaluation and analyse the performance and make necessary bid accordingly.

In this kind of situation, the ideal way is to look at progressive longer range of data until keyword or ad group that you are trying to bid has enough data for analysis. This approach is particularly needed when the ad group has consistent performance over the years. The range should be increased till the time a comparison data is not found. 

Seasonality is also a valid factor for understanding. It makes the data skewed when evaluation of longer data is done. In this kind of situation, handling higher level entities for the account is beneficial. This kind of strategy can give favorable result, if the keywords are bunched logically keeping the similar keywords in one group.

Another important approach is to group biddable entities based on similarity without restricting yourself to account structure. To do this, one needs an effective bid tool to perform the task.

Some more bid management strategy include:

• Portfolio bidding

The way of portfolio bidding management is to set bid at ads group level so the list of keyword in each ad group act like a portfolio. Google’s flexible bid strategies like target CPA and target ROAS are some good examples of portfolio rules. The good thing about portfolio bidding management system is one can decide which ad group or campaign should be grouped under similar strategy.

For example, if you have two strategy for similar goals such as target CPA but applying on different set group can create two different portfolio that should meet the goal independently.

• Rule based bidding

Rule based bidding is entirely opposite to portfolio bidding. In rule based bidding, rather grouping keywords to achieve a target on an average basis, it analyses each item be it keywords or ad groups individually and force them to meet the goal.

For example, if your keyword is getting more than 100 clicks and CPA less than $20, then it may want you to change the bid by 10%. Rule based bidding does not keep heard of other keyword or how bid may change the impact of the bid on other keywords.

Rule based bidding can be done using adwords automated rule that can be scheduled once per day for action. If you want your rule to run frequently, you can build your adwords script for it.

• Bidding with incremental cost per click

For an appropriate bidding management, consider amount of profit or quantity of conversion. If you want to better profit, reconsider your bid in the context of incremental cost per click calculation. Experts believe that bidding for valuable increment generally bring profitable results but not necessarily it will maximize the profit.

Bidding more to get increased number of clicks by individuals, you unknowingly begin exceeding the desired cost to attain incremental growth. Use Adwords Bid Landscapes to get a clear picture of right kind of bid for maximizing profit.

• Google bid strategy

One of the easiest way of bid management is Google bid strategy. Google has incredible amount of data which helps in analysing and set real time bids. It has always been a great place for advertisers to auction and set right price.

The practice should be to adjust the bidding for all factors, however,the limitation with this procedure is the adjustments are made in portfolio while it is needed for individual keywords. To avoid this you will have to make one campaign for each keyword which is practically not possible.

The only solution is enhanced CPC. eCPC advertisers control the CPC based on their knowledge for their business. In this Google is allowed to increase or decrease the bid in real time based factors

Read More: Top PPC Mistake

Conclusion

Bid management is quiet a vast arena for understanding especially for people who have low information about it. The above stated points can help you in understanding the concept better and get it ideally suitable for your purpose.