Choosing the right Google Ads bidding strategy for your ads is an important decision to drive traffic to your website. The better you understand your bidding strategy, the less you will have to pay for it. Choosing the right bidding strategy for your website is key when calculating Return on Investment (ROI). If you don’t know about bidding strategies and do it wrong in the Google Ads bidding process, you may get less profit but pay more. In this article, we’ll cover 12 Google Ads bidding volumes to improve performance and drive growth.

How does Google Ads bidding work?

Google gives you a multitude of ways to bid on Google Ads depending on what your end goal is. Most advertisers focus on clicks, impressions, conversions, or views (for video ads).
Every time Google has ad space on a site in the search network or search results, it runs an auction. The auction decides which ads to show at that time in that space. Your bid puts you in the auction. It sounds simple, but there are a lot of nuances. Understanding those nuances is the best way to become a better contractor. Depending on your business goals, there are several ways to set your Google Ads bid. Each Google Ads auction takes three key factors into account when deciding how to rank your ads:

1. Your maximum cost-per-click bid for the keyword
2. Your Quality Score for that keyword
3. Your ad extensions and their relevance to ads and keywords

The Google Ads auction is incredibly fast (and incredibly frequent). So you must know what’s out there to take advantage of.

Google Ads Bidding Methods 

When you’re setting goals for your PPC(Pay-per-click) campaign, especially in the context of Google Ads bidding and average cost-per-conversion, you must account for the trade-off between conversion volume and cost per conversion. For example, you can keep lowering your bids, but that will ultimately affect your conversion volume. You can also continue to increase your Google Ads bids, which can increase your conversion volume. But that will also ultimately increase your cost-per-conversion, and you’ll burn your budget faster.

1. To avoid those two scenarios, here are Google Ads bidding best practices you can follow:
2. Make sure your conversion tracking is checked and accurate.
3. Make sure your attribution model is tested and aligned with your goals.
4. A/B test your bidding strategies with Google Drafts & Experiments.
5. Research your goals and choose the Google Ads bidding strategy that best suits it. Example: If you want to increase brand awareness, focus on impressions, not clicks.
6. Evaluate your ad performance
7. Be patient and wait for enough data to make the right decisions about Google Ads bid adjustments. Run everything until you reach a confidence level of at least 95%.
8. Simplify your account structure so you can easily make changes to your bid strategy.

12 Google Ads Bidding Strategies

You should always monitor performance fluctuations. And if you improve your conversion rates through landing page testing, understand that your Google Ads bidding goals can improve and change very quickly. For example, higher conversion rates can support more aggressive bidding strategies.

1. Target CPA

Get as many conversions as you can with the target CPA you set. This is best to use if your goal is to hit your target and increase leads. If your primary advertising goal is to get conversions (like sales, signups, or mobile app downloads) at a specified CPA target, target CPA bidding can help automatically get more conversions for your budget. It uses your conversion tracking data to avoid unprofitable clicks and get more conversions at a lower cost. Target CPA automatically generates bids to try and meet your target CPA.

2. Return on Investment on Ad Spend

ROAS is a metric that takes into account your conversion value (set at the conversion tracking stage) or Google Analytics eCommerce revenue value. Let’s say you want an ROI of 7. This means that for every $1 you spend on clicks, you are expecting $7 back. The target ROAS of the bid strategy will then be set to 700%.

3. Maximize Clicks

With “Maximize Clicks,” Google Ads will automatically set your bid to help you get as many clicks as possible within your budget. This is ideal to use when you have strong conversion performance and want to find more volume.
4. Maximize Conversions
If your goal is to increase sales or leads, you can have Google automatically set bids to help you get the highest number of conversions within your budget. This strategy is great for using your entire budget in one day.

5. Maximize Conversion Value

Google Ads automatically sets your bids to help you get the most conversion value within your budget. Google uses information gathered about the device, location, time of day, demographics, and queries to find the optimal CPC bid for each auction.

6. Target Impression Rate

Target impression share bidding automatically sets Google Ads bids to help achieve your Impression Share goal across all campaigns. There are three options for the Target Impression Share strategy, depending on where you want your ad to show:

1. On the absolute top
2. On top
3. Anywhere on the Google search results page

This strategy allows you to set a maximum CPC bid limit, which is a limit on the full amount you will allow the bidding strategy to. If you set your limit too low, you run the risk of limiting your bids, which could affect your goals. If you don’t set a cap at all, your CPC can skyrocket and you could burn through your budget quickly.

7. Manual cost-per-click (CPC)

Manual cost-per-click allows you to set Google Ads bids at the ad group or keyword level. Individual bidding at the keyword level allows the greatest degree of control. In contrast, ad group-level manual bids offer the same bid for all keywords or placements in that ad group. This is often the best bidding strategy for new advertisers, new accounts, or new campaigns. You can keep a close eye on performance and ensure that none of your ads are overspent.
Important note: Keyword-level bids override ad group-level bids.

8. Enhanced cost-per-click (ECPC)

Enhanced CPC (ECPC) is an intelligent bid setting that you can apply to manual CPC, giving Google the freedom to increase or decrease your Google Ads bid when it determines there are more or fewer opportunities to convert. Auctions consider many other factors, including:

1. Geographical location
2. Time of day
3. Device
4. Your audience, potential visitors are part of
5. Web browsing behavior
6. Your ad’s expected CTR
7. Your Quality Score

9. Viewable CPM (cost per 1,000 impressions)

Available only to the Display Network, viewable CPM bidding allows you to set a target bid for every 1,000 impressions your display ad is deemed viewable. Previously, you could use Target CPM bidding on display campaigns, meaning you’d pay for 1,000 impressions even if the majority of your ads were below the fold and not showing. town. Now you only pay when your ads are seen them.

10. Maximum CPV (cost per view)

If you’re going to increase brand awareness with a Youtube campaign, this bid strategy would be one of two bidding options. With max CPV, you set the highest bid you’re willing to pay for a video view (or an interaction with your ad). 30 seconds watched is considered a view, or if your video ad is shorter, the entire viewed ad is considered a view. If someone interacts with your ad first, by clicking on any overlay you have or similar, you’ll be charged your CPV bid for that. So you don’t have to pay people to skip your ad or close the video before the ad ends.

11. Target CPM (cost per 1,000 impressions)

As we mentioned earlier, this strategy used to be available for display campaigns, but now it’s only available on YouTube. With this strategy, you’ll be charged your specified target CPM, which isn’t a maximum, but instead, the average bid you can pay for every 1,000 times your ad is posted. display. Whether or not a viewer watches through or skips your ad, your cost is still based on the fact that your ad was shown.

12. Portfolio bid strategy

Portfolio bid strategies are when you create one bid strategy that applies across multiple campaigns, rather than applying different strategies at the campaign level. Available portfolio bid strategies are: Target CPA, maximize conversions, maximize conversion value, target ROAS, and target impression share. Portfolio bid strategies placed in your shared library.