Adwords Bidding Strategies

When setting up a new campaign, or reviewing your performance data it’s important to consider how to bid. Whether is manual, automatic, or using one of the many flexible bidding strategies, you should understand how they work, and the impact they’ll have on your performance, and the time it will take to monitor and maintain your campaigns.

You can locate your Campaign Level bidding options in the Settings tab of your Campaign.

First, the basic options:

• Manual bidding: This is the default strategy to let you manage your maximum CPC bids yourself. You can set bids at the ad group level, or for individual keywords.

• Automatic bidding: If you're new to AdWords (or if you're busy), we recommend this strategy. All you have to do is set an average daily budget, and the AdWords system manages your bids for you, to bring you the most clicks possible within your budget. You can still set a max. CPC with this option.

Now the intermediate level... Conversion Tracking and Bidding
If you are using Conversion Tracking in your AdWords Account, you can use that conversion data to enable Enhanced CPC or Conversion Optimizer.

When turned on, Enhanced cost-per-click (ECPC) will raises your bid for clicks that seem more likely to lead to a sale or conversion on your website. That helps you get more valueable clicks. ECPC does a lot of work for you. It will look for ad auctions that are more likely to lead to sales for you (based on keywords that have converted in the past), and then raises your max CPC bid up to 30 percent to compete harder for those clicks. To read more about ECPC and its best practices, check out our Help Center here.
 
The goal of Conversion Optimizer is to get you the most conversions given your cost-per-acquisition (CPA) goals. Rather than focusing on clicks (CPC) or impressions (CPM), Conversion Optimizer focuses on maximizing conversions. To read more about Conversion Optimizer and tips to follow if you want to implement it, check out our Help Center here.
 
So what’s the difference between ECPC and Conversion Optimizer? Both ECPC and Conversion Optimizer work to get you more conversions. The key difference: ECPC works with the max CPC bid you set, never going more than 30 percent over it. Conversion Optimizer needs no max CPC, though it does require a CPA bid. Conversion Optimizer gives you the very best chance to improve your results, but ECPC provides a level of control and comfort that some people prefer.

And Advanced - Flexible Bidding Strategies!
As you may have noticed, these bidding settings are at the camapaign level. If you want to apply a different bidding strategy to specific keywords across multiple adgroups, or one adgroup in a larger campaign, Flexible bid strategies are for you! Flexible bid strategies let you apply multiple bidding strategies within a single campaign or across campaigns. This provides you the freedom to choose the appropriate bid strategy without being constrained by account structure.