Search Ads 360 bid strategies optimise your advertising spend across client accounts. They monitor the performance of keywords and product groups and adjust bids and budgets to achieve the highest number of conversions, the greatest amount of revenue or impression share or the highest number of clicks that your campaign budgets allow.
Depending on your business goals and whether you want to focus on getting clicks, impression share, conversions or revenue, automated bidding can help you achieve your goals effectively and efficiently.
Consider your goals
Each bid strategy is suited to different kinds of campaigns and advertising goals. For the purposes of bidding, you'll want to consider 3 basic types of goals, along with your current campaign settings.
- If you want customers to take a direct action on your site and you're using conversion tracking, it may be best to focus on conversions. Automated bidding lets you do that.
- If you want to generate traffic to your website, focusing on clicks could be ideal for you. A budget bid strategy with maximise clicks bidding may be right for your campaign.
- If you want to maximise visibility for your ads, focusing on bidding for the top placements on the search results page might help your goals. The target impression share bid strategy can help you focus on your ad visibility.
Focus on conversions with automated bidding
If you want to focus on conversions, consider using automated bidding to take much of the heavy lifting and guesswork out of setting bids and budgets. Search Ads 360 bid strategies are a set of automated bid strategies that use Google AI to optimise for conversions or conversion value.
Return on investment (ROI) bid strategies
If you use Floodlight activities or Google Analytics to track activity on your site, you can create automated bid strategies that find the optimal bids for maximising the number of conversions or the revenue generated on your site at a targeted cost-per-action (CPA), return on advertising spend (ROAS) or within a set budget using budget bid strategies.
For example, you can create a bid strategy that observes which keywords are effective at leading customers to request a quote for your services. The bid strategy will then adjust bids for these specific keywords to maximise customer requests at the optimal advertising spend.
Below are the 5 Search Ads 360 bid strategies you can use.
- Target cost-per-action (CPA): If you want to optimise for conversions, you can use target CPA to help increase conversions while targeting a specific cost-per-action (CPA). Learn more about target CPA bidding.
- Target return on ad spend (ROAS): If you want to optimise for conversion value, you can use target ROAS to help increase conversion value while targeting a specific return on ad spend (ROAS). Learn more about target ROAS bidding.
- Budget bid strategy: maximise conversions: If you want to optimise for conversions but just want to spend your entire budget instead of targeting a specific CPA, you can use a budget bid strategy with a maximise conversions target. You also have the option to set a maximum CPA that the budget bid strategy can achieve while spending the budget. Learn more about budget bid strategies.
- Budget bid strategy: maximise conversion value: If you want to optimise for conversion value but just want to spend your entire budget instead of targeting a specific ROAS, you can use a budget bid strategy with a maximise conversion value target. You also have the option to set a maximum ROAS that the budget bid strategy can achieve while spending the budget. Learn more about budget bid strategies.
Focus on clicks with CPC bidding
If you're focusing on gaining clicks to generate traffic to your website, you can consider the maximise clicks budget bid strategy. This is an automated budget bid strategy. It's the simplest way to bid for clicks. All you have to do is set a budget target for your specified plan period and the Search Ads 360 system automatically manages your bids and budgets to bring you the most clicks possible within your budget.
Advantages of the budget bid strategy: maximise clicks
Maximise clicks could be a good option for you if the following describes your campaign:
- You have an advertising budget that you'd like to reach consistently.
- You don't want to spend time monitoring and updating individual CPC bids and you're willing to let the Search Ads 360 system update CPC bids automatically.
- You're mainly interested in increasing website traffic.
- You're new to Search Ads 360 or don't know exactly how much to bid for particular keywords or placements.
Example
You have a website that sells a variety of art supplies and your main goal is to bring more customers to your site. You have a set amount that you want to spend on advertising each month and there isn't a particular product you want to emphasise most. Maximise clicks lets you decide the overall amount of your budget, then we'll find you the most customers based on that.
Focus on visibility with target impression share
If you want to focus on visibility, you can try the target impression share bid strategy to help maximise visibility. This applies to Google Ads, Microsoft Advertising and Yahoo! JAPAN Ads campaigns only. It 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 publisher search results. Learn more about target impression share.