Best Practices for Optimum PPC Bid Management

Pay per click bid management is not an easy technique to master. There are a lot of things to be considered before putting your links live. There are times that you will lose money. Every business experiences losses. But if you know what you are doing, pay per click can be a gold mine. Before you dive into the pay per click experience, you have to be equipped with all the right tools and knowledge. You can’t just pick one software, pay the fees, and be on your merry way to riches. You have to be selective in choosing your software. You can read reviews of PPC bid management software to help you pick one that will suit your business needs. You also have to be prepared, and you have to know what you are getting into. Similarly, you have to know the best practices to be successful in this endeavor. Here are some compiled best practices to achieve an optimum PPC bid management.

Choose Your Strategy

Choosing a strategy will depend upon what your business goal is going to be. Your goal is what you hope to achieve when you choose a bidding strategy. For every strategy, there can only be one goal or objective. An example of a goal is to increase your return on investment by 2.5% or to increase the position of your link to the third spot in the search results page. Another goal would be to maximize the profit or the revenue. Depending on the goal you want to achieve, there is a strategy that can help you get your goal.

There are two things to consider when achieving your goal. There is bid management, and then, there is bid optimization. What is the difference between the two, you ask? Well, let’s define some words first before we go to optimization and management.

1. This is what you are striving to achieve. One strategy will have one goal. Examples were already mentioned above.
2. According to Acquisio, constraints are the boundaries, whether lower or upper, that will control your campaign, so it doesn’t surpass the limits that you have set.
3. It is a group of elements that has the same goals, the same constraints, and one budget.

Now, let’s differentiate bid management and bid optimization. But first, both are tools for setting of bids that are in the larger scale and in bulks. PPC bid management software is used in bid management while search engine optimization is used in bid optimization. The bid management’s goal is the constraint, meaning it is a numerical value and specific. The examples of goals for bid management is increasing the return on investment by 2.5% or getting the position of a link to number three. All while, taking into consideration the limits that have been set. On the other hand, bid optimization’s goal is to be optimized. So it is a bit more open ended and is not very specific at all. Because it is open ended and has no numeric goals, it can only be done on a portfolio. An example of a bid optimization’s goal is to maximize profits and revenue or to maximize conversions and traffic.

Customize Your Strategy

Because this article is about bid management, we’ll focus on pay per click bid management. Under this, there are different bidding strategies that you can optimize to meet your goals. Here are the following strategies that the top PPC bid management software offers:

1. Cost Per click (CPC) Bidding. The main goal of this strategy is to get people to visit your site and focus on clicks. This type of bidding will only let you pay when someone clicks on your link and redirects to your website. For this type of bidding, you set a maximum CPC, which is the amount of money you are willing to pay for a click. This might be more time consuming than other bidding strategies because this requires you to check on your bids regularly to make sure that they are optimized. The formula for CPC bidding is maximum CPC bid equals to conversion rate multiplied by your target cost per conversion. With the fluctuating conversion rates, it will require constant monitoring to make sure that your max CPC is still within budget.
2. Auto Bidding. PPC bid management tools offer auto bidding for their clients. Like Google AdWords, auto bidding is available. This strategy will bring you the most number of visitors the search engine can get, provided your daily budget allows it. With auto bidding, your bids are automatically adjusted, so you can get cheaper clicks. It will make things easier especially if you handle large campaigns. Unfortunately, there are downsides to it:
   1. You can’t increase the bids on keywords that are really vital to your campaign. The keywords that will receive more bids will depend on the automatic bidding.
   2. You have less control over the amount of bid a keyword receives. There are instances that automatic bidding brought the bid to up $360. Even insurance won’t reach that amount. The most expensive keyword is auto insurance price quotes that cost $54.91 per click.
   3. You can’t invest more on the keywords with the highest conversions because auto bidding will choose the keywords to be invested more on for you.
3. Enhanced CPC. Enhanced CPC means that some of your keywords will receive increased bids. They will be more competitive, but it will be just in selected auctions. In auctions where it will likely result in increased conversion, your bids can be increased to up to 30% of your max CPC. This type of strategy can be used when you still want some control over the bidding process because this is not fully automated. You can still have a lot of control over the bidding, but automation is still highly present.
4. Conversion Optimizer. This is when the PPC bid management software will set the bids for you in order to get as many conversions as possible. Unfortunately, you have to have data for this to work. This will only function if you feed the software data from the previous days of your campaign. So it won’t work when you are just starting with your pay per click.
5. Cost Per Acquisition Strategy. This is the technique used if you want to maximize the conversions you receive for a specific price. The cost with this strategy won’t just be per click anymore but per acquisition. Acquisition can be an impression, a form submission, a click, or any specified action. You can use this strategy when you have specific actions that you want your visitors to make, like putting items in a shopping cart in your site or signing up for your newsletter.
6. Return on Ad Spending (ROAS) Strategy. This is the strategy to be used if you want a specific amount of profit to be delivered within the budget you have set. The formula for this is ROAS equals to revenue divided by the cost. This is usually used when your business offers products of differing amounts. This is because using ROAS can average the entire revenue that you generate with all your products. This is a common strategy that pay per click bid management software

Test Your Strategy

One of the most common mistakes that marketers make is not testing their advertisements before they put it live. How will you know if your strategy will work if you don’t put it to the test first? Putting your links live immediately can cost you money and lose you time. The top PPC bid management software will help you with testing your strategy. Here are some tips for you:

1. You Should Have a Testing Plan. Don’t test everything all at once at one time. That will create confusion and will not likely give you credible results.
2. Use Focus Groups. You could ask them the things they particularly like from your business and your advertisement.
3. Don‘t Use Too Much Flash on Your Pages. It’s not actually true that boring pages will not convert better. It would be worse if clients visit your page and close it immediately because of the ostentatiousness of it.

Refine Where Needed

There are elements that you should definitely include in your page. Similarly, these are also the elements that you should test and refine when you see fit. Headline is first, which should contain your keywords. Company information is next, which should contain information where clients can contact you. Image is the third that should be related to whatever product or service you are offering. Benefit statements is fourth, which contains why your clients should get your product or service. Lastly, call to action (CTA) is very important in a page; this is what you want your clients to do when they reach your page. Other than refining the elements of your page, it is important that you use the best software available. You could get the best tools by reading reviews of PPC bid management software available in review sites. It will give you an insight on what will be perfect for your bid management needs.

Head on to CrowdReviews.com for rankings and reviews of some of the best PPC bid management software available in the market.

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Keith Moore

Keith Moore has worked with several leading Android development agencies to build customized mobile apps enabling businesses to extend the use of their services to smart phones and mobile devices.

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