PPC Bid Management
PPC bid management isn’t just about ‘getting to number 1′, it’s about buying clicks that are going to convert at a financially justifiable rate.
But rewind – it’s also about impressions. Because if you bid high, you are likely to appear high and if you appear high, you’ll get more impressions from which you must get a good number of clicks to maintain a high quality score – remember that?
Quick recap – quality score is the metric that Google multiplies your bid by to calculate your ad’s position. In other words, a high quality score means that you’ll be able to out-position some of your competitors with a lower price.
So… getting back to my original point – if you bid high on the wrong keyword or use poor ad text, you’re going to increase your impressions but not necessarily your clicks. This will make your click-through-rate drop and quality score drop simultaneously.
Why does this matter?
Because the quality score that a keyword has is calculated by the performance of your whole account! So what looks like an unrelated experiment could actually be affecting your cost-per-click (ie your margin) of other keywords!
What should you do?
So blindly bidding on keywords can both decrease your quality score at the same time as being a high-risk ‘all-in’, ‘head-first’ marketing strategy,
Instead, you should use what we call ‘stacking’. This means you should:
1. Use Google’s Keyword Tool to find out the estimated position 1-3 bid for a search term
2. Bid this amount for the [exact match] version of the keyword
3. Bid on this keyword again (in the same ad group) using “phrase match” – but use 70% of this bid
4. And finally, bid on the broad match using just 50% of the bid
We sometimes keep the broad match version of a keyword paused until we’ve seen how successful the phrase and exact match is doing or, alternatively, you could put the broad matches in their own separate campaign to give your safer phrase/exact match bets what I call ‘budget immunity’ – ie prevent the unpredictable broad matches from eating up the low-risk budget of your phrase/exact matches.
So PPC bid management is a bit more complex than it first seems but if you appreciate how to use match-types and the effect of quality score, you’re well on your way!
If you’d like any help on this, don’t hesitate to call us on 0843 289 2336 or contact us using our online form.
