Going once, going twice, sold! Have you ever wondered how Google AdWords decides which ads to display across search engine results pages (SERPs), or even the order to arrange them in? It’s actually all determined by auction bids! With so many benefits to strong pay-per-click advertising, it’s essential to develop a strategy that rewards your company with a high return. That also means developing a strategy that puts your goals at the forefront, right? With goal based Google AdWords bidding, companies can choose the most effective bid strategy to achieve their advertising goals.
Whether your company considers lead generation, website traffic, brand awareness, or ads views the highest priority, we’ve got you covered! With these goal based Google AdWords bidding strategies, you can make the most of your advertising budget and bid farewell to wasted spend!
Take the Lead in Lead Generation
Many companies take their advertising spend online with the purpose of attracting new customers. If your primary objective is lead generation—or in AdWords, increasing conversions—action-oriented campaigns are the way to go. When website visitors see your ad, the language should encourage them towards a specific action. “Buy Now,” “Contact Us,” and “Call Today” (ideal for PPC Call-Only campaigns!) use specific verbs, providing potential customers with direction. Once they’re on your landing page, they should see the same language. As a result, customers will remain focused on completing that same action (instead of getting distracted the same way some people “impulse bid” at real auctions).
Setting up bids to Maximize Conversions, however, requires that you have conversion data to start with. These conversions can include web visitors filling out a form, calling your company from the ad or a telephone link on your landing page, or making an online purchase.
Other conversion-based bid strategies include Target Cost-Per Acquisition, Target Return-on-Ad-Spend, and Enhanced Cost-Per-Click. Like Maximize Conversions, these strategies work more effectively when you have a previous data on your side. Once AdWords has more information based on these conversions, it can learn to automatically optimize your bids to help you get the most conversions within your budget. That way, the bids are tailored specifically for those conversion actions—and you!
Direct Traffic Your Way
If your advertising objective is to increase website traffic—and perhaps develop that initial conversion data—choosing Maximize Clicks as your goal based Google AdWords bidding strategy is the way to go. This automated bid strategy recognizes your daily budget—how much you’re willing to spend a day on a single campaign—and sets your bids to get as many clicks as possible within that budget.
For companies that feel like the automated Maximize Clicks strategy doesn’t offer enough control, you can add a Maximum CPC (cost-per-click) bid limit to your campaign settings. Manual CPC bidding allows you to set maximum bid limits on individual keywords for even more control. As a result, you can keep those bids under control, too!
Those ad clicks direct visitors to your website where they can explore, familiarize themselves with your brand, and possibly convert from visitors into leads—or even paying customers!
Bid on the Brand
For companies that want to go big on brand awareness while remaining within budget, impression-based campaigns are the move to make! To maximize online visibility, companies can focus on Target Search Page Location (increasing your chance of reach the tip top of the page), Target Outranking Share (so you can bid beyond competitors), Cost-per-Thousand Impressions (CPM, which is based on the number of times your ads are shown), or Cost-per-Thousand Viewable Impressions (vCPM, which is based on how much you want to pay for every 1,000 ad impressions).
These bid strategies are most effective for Google AdWords display ads and video ads, allowing companies to show off their brands with style. Using impression-based bidding, you can increase brand awareness without driving traffic to your website—or blowing your budget!
Bid Adieu to Wasted Ad Spend with Goal Based Google AdWords Bidding
Bid farewell to wasting away your advertising budget. By determining your primary advertising objective, you can also determine the best goal based Google AdWords bidding strategy to achieve those objectives while avoiding a major AdWords mistake—forgetting to establish your goals in the first place! Now you can bid with smart strategies and take the online auction block by storm!
Need a little help outbidding the competition? Let’s get appraising!