Use manual bids in Adwords

The main benefit of using manual bidding strategies is to have total control over the keywords and to determine how aggressive you want to be with your bids at the most specific and granular level, to get A good ROA and much more strategic advertising investment goals.

In the last post we talked about the Automatic Bidding strategies of Adwords and the benefits of each. But what are the drawbacks of these strategies and why is it good to have total control over the Adwords account bid changes?

The Advantages of a Manual Bidding Strategy

For a person with limited Adwords experience, the phrase ‘ automatic strategy ‘ may seem very appealing, but many factors need to be taken into account when deciding which is the best bidding strategy to use in different accounts. Automatic bidding strategies are based on historical account data but if, for example, there is a tracking failure at some point, or the account has fewer conversions per seasonality or because a product is out of stock, the system is not going to know the Razo And will continue to adjust the bids based on these data.  We’Re talking about a machine that can’t recognize real-life factors that can affect an account.

A manual bidding strategy allows us to adjust the bids individually and modify them at any time. You need to carefully analyze the account’s historical data at the keyword level, such as position, conversion cost, and conversion rate, in order to make the decision to raise, lower, or maintain bids. What you need to do is to download a keyword report with relevant data for a given period of time. We can’t advise you which is the ‘correct’ average duration for this particular period, as it depends on each account and the accumulated data. On the one hand, you need to have enough conversions to be able to make decisions and adjust bids. On the other hand, we do not want to go too far back in time to not lose the current data and run the risk that they are not representative (seasonality, changes, competition, etc.).

The Different Types of Concordance

An effective way to handle bids is by dividing the keywords according to their concordance – exact, wide and phrase – and adjusting bids based on CONCORDANCE, CPA and position. Normally, the exact words will have a higher CPC compared to the others, but a higher conversion rate and a lower CPA. Our main goal should be for most traffic to come to the account through exact words and have the broad ones to pick up the unique searches that happen Daily on Google. We’ll download the Search Terms Reports and add the relevant terms to the account as accurate.

What is the reason for this strategy? If we don’t, we don’t have total control over our keywords. Instead of handling 100 different bids of exact words and playing with the position and the CPA of each one of them, by not having them in the account we would be limited to adjust a single bid, that of the keyword in broad agreement that is generating them.

Another thing that we must take into account when we are analyzing the different concordances is that the more specific the type of concordance, the greater the bid. In other words, what we want to achieve through manual bids is Mplias< amplias=”” modificadas=””>< frase=””><>. By having a higher bid on a broad concordance keyword than in an exact match, it is possible that the broad will ‘swallow‘ The impressions and clicks that should go to the exact one. One way to verify this is to make sure that at the broad account level are ranked lower than the exact.

CASE 1: I Want to find the key words with margin of improvement that I can bring more conversions within my CPA Objective

An example to apply this strategy is the following (in this case, we want to find key words that could improve performance through bid increments):

• We have downloaded a campaign report and selected the campaigns that in the last 30 days have had at least 3 conversions (to have more certainty about the data).
• From here we look at the key keyword groups of these campaigns, remove the ‘ bad ‘ (for example those who have spent more of the CPA that we have as a goal without conversions, etc) and we stay with the groups that interest us.
• We take the keywords of these groups and apply similar logics to find keywords that we want to optimize (example of cases in which we do not want to increase the bid: The keyword is exact concordance and is already in position 1.0; The keyword has an X% CTR below the account average and is in the first three positions; The keyword has been expended x% more of the Target CPA and has not brought conversions; The difference between the Max CPC and the AVG CPC is not more than x%, etc. These rules depend on individual account analysis and objectives.
• We have finished with a 250 key-word sheet (for example) to increase bid. What we would do in this case is divide the keywords by concordance and position and apply different settings for each case. The bid setting of an exact one in position 1.3 will be greater than the setting for a wide in the same position. Also, an exact word in position 2.3 is going to have a higher bid setting than the exact one in position 1.4.

CASE 2: I want to reduce the CPA of keywords or groups that are above my CPA Objective

And what do we do with the cases where the CPA is above our target? We apply different adjustments depending on how many times the CPA of the keyword is higher than the desired CPA. What if we have a group of keywords where none of them have been expended more than the Target CPA, but overall the group’s CPA is above the desired one? We apply an x% setting to all keywords in the group. We can get the information of these keywords and groups through the previous analysis we have done, looking at the data we have left behind (we have not wanted to increase).

Another way to reduce bids is by looking at the conversion rate of these keywords and groups and consider it as the expected future conversion rate. There’s a study Very interesting of Google that tells us that the rate of conversion does not vary so much depending on the position that has the announcement. In this case, what we could do is look at the keywords and groups that have a CPA above our target and calculate the Max CPC as Cpa objective * Conversion rate. The objective CPA may be the one we want to reach at the account level, but we can have exceptions, such as cases that bring many conversions – we want to lower the CPA but without drastically reducing the volume, and in these cases we can accept a higher CPA than the desired.

The disadvantage of this strategy is that we are assuming that the conversion rate For these cases is the same despite the location of the user, the device you are using, the fact that you have visited our website previously, etc. what is there to do in this situation? This is where bid modifiers play an important role. Google allows us to adjust the bids based on different percentages at the level of location, device, lists of RemarketingEtc.

But this is another story! To find out more about bid modifiers and how to use them and also about remarketing in search and how the auction process has changed in Google, stay tuned for our next post!