Pay Per Click Bidding Management: A Beginner’s Guide

Are you thinking of using pay per click (PPC) to market your business? There are many things you have to know starting from the basics. The very foundation of PPC is the bid management. Without it, essentially you won’t have a pay per click marketing. It affects both the process of PPC and its results. There are many strategies for bidding and managing it. It can be overwhelming, but you can take one thing at a time and start with just learning them for now. You wouldn’t have to apply anything, reading about them will do. Then, when you are feeling more acclimated, you can go on experimenting on the different strategies and techniques. For now, this article will start with the definitions of terms that you might come across often when learning about pay per click bid management.

Definition of Terms

Pay per click is an advertising strategy or a business plan where a company places links in search engines for an amount of money. When someone clicks on that link, the company will pay the search engine money, thus it is called pay per click.

PPC bid management software is a tool used by marketers in bidding on certain keywords that they will be using for their marketing campaign.

Cost per click bidding is the maximum amount of money you are willing to pay for a click that your link will receive. This is also called max CPC, which means that you will only pay when someone clicks on your link and is great if you want direct response from your viewers.

Cost per thousand impressions, on the other hand, is paying a set amount of money for your advertisement to be shown a thousand times. You will pay as long as your advertisement is getting visibility, it doesn’t matter if no viewers will click on it. That is why this is used to promote awareness of your brand rather than getting direct responses.

Cost per acquisition bidding is optimizing your bids to achieve as many conversions per cost per acquisition that you set. You have to have a conversion tracker set if you want to employ this type of bid management.

Goals of Bid Management

Before you start using PPC bid management tools, you have to establish what your goals are. Every marketer has them; otherwise, they would not know what they are working on. It is always a good idea to set goals. Here are the most common goals that marketers desire to achieve when they use pay per click bidding.

1. To increase brand awareness by showing lots of impressions while still staying under budget and the set amount of thousands of impressions.
2. To increase traffic of website by getting lots of viewers to click on advertised link showing in search results pages of search engine sites, while still staying on target budget and cost per click.
3. To increase leads with the cost per acquisition bidding management while still staying on the set budget and target.
4. To increase sales by increasing conversions.

These different goals mean using different bidding strategies, which will be mentioned later. If you have, other goals aside from the abovementioned, well and good. You just have to match your established goals to a bid management style that will suit them.

Strategies for Bidding

There are different strategies in bidding depending on your PPC bid management software. But here are some of the automated bid strategies that Google has in their PPC platform, which is the AdWords.

1. Maximize clicks. The goal of this strategy is to increase visitors to your website and clicks to your keywords that are receiving low traffic. It works by automatically setting your bid to get as many clicks as possible within your allotted budget.
2. Target search page location. This is to increase the visibility of your site when it appears in the search results page of the Google search engine. It works by setting your bid to have a high chance of appearing on the top of the search results page.
3. Target outranking share. This is also to increase visibility of your site than the other domains in the search results. It works by choosing a domain that you would want to outrank and the PPC platform will do its job of letting you outrank the site. How often you outrank the domain would depend on you.
4. Target CPA. The objective is to get you more conversions by setting your bids to get you as many conversions.
5. Enhanced cost per click. This seeks to increase your conversions while still being in control of your bids. It works by adjusting your manual bids to maximize your conversions.
6. Target ROAS. This strategy is to get you a return on your spending by getting you as much conversion as possible.

The best PPC bid management software may have more strategies to help you meet your goals. Picking the management software is as important as your marketing campaign in ensuring the success of your business. That is why you should take careful consideration in picking your management software. Reading reviews of PPC bid management software will help you decide which tool to pick to suit your business needs.

How to Apply the Strategies

Applying the bid strategies mentioned above will depend on the PPC bid management platform. They can be applied at the campaign level or the ad group level. According to the Advertising Community, campaign contains the ad group. While the ad group contains the advertisements and the keywords. So if you will look at it, the hierarchy is campaign at the top, ad group in the middle and keywords at the bottom. The bidding strategies can be placed either in the campaign level, meaning the whole campaign plan will be under that strategy. Or the strategy can be placed at the ad group level, meaning it will only involve one ad group. There can be many ad groups in one campaign. Get a bid management software that will offer you lots of strategies and is easy to implement within your campaign. Reading PPC bid management software reviews will help you pick the best one.

Manage the Bids

There are many ways in which you can manage your bids. The first one is through automated rules. This is where you can set up your bids from the simplest options to the most complicated ones. The advantage of using this type of management is that there are lots of options for this type. You can change the options to raise the bids on keywords that gets lots of conversions or to stop bidding on those that are not getting you clients. The second way is through the use of API scripts. This lets you totally customize your bid management but it can be more difficult especially if you are not well versed in making scripts. The last way is through the use of a bid management software. This makes handling bids more efficient especially if you handle lots of campaigns and ad groups. It will make your job easier. There are many software available out there, so read PPC bid management software reviews to make it easier to choose one.

Automated vs Manual Bidding

Depending on the PPC manager, using automated or manual bidding will have its own pros and cons. Manual bidding involves skills since the manager won’t be relying on automated solutions. When it comes to increasing and decreasing bids, it will all be done manually so you really should know what you’re doing. You will be involved in every part of the PPC process. On the other hand, automated bidding is all about automation. There will be an algorithm that will be in charge of the changes in the bidding of keywords.

Using manual bidding gives you more control of the bidding process but you also need to have a quick reaction when monitoring your account because you are the one in control. The downside to this is that it can be difficult when you are handling large accounts. Those with many ad groups in it. It would be very difficult to handle all of them and do it effectively. It may cause some inefficiencies.

Using automated bidding can give you the ability to segment your campaigns which can’t be done in the manual bidding. It is also more efficient because it is automated and lets you handle many and more complex accounts. The downside is that there can be delay in the changes that you want.

Drawbacks of Bid Management

You cannot predict everything that will happen and that is one drawback of bid management. You can be doing well today and tomorrow your conversions are down. There is a lot to learn in this type of marketing. Although, you could use expert managers, if you want to do things on your own you have a long way to go. You are likely to make mistakes at first but you can learn from them and improve. Now you’re through with this beginner’s guide, hopefully you have gained some new knowledge that will help you with your PPC campaign.

Need help finding the best PPC bid management software? Head on to CrowdReviews.com to check out the rankings and reviews.

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Trevor Price

Trevor Price helps small businesses leverage mobile technology to reach their audience and extend their capabilities in delivery, information, and tracking.

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