Google has a tremendous amount of data about how people interact with ads and the computing power and machine learning models to find useful patterns within this.
Combine that with the fact they make bid management available for free to all advertisers and it’s no surprise that their bidding tools are some of the most widely used in the PPC world.
Optmyzr’s tools are the perfect complement for Google’s bid automation, enabling advertisers to monitor and analyze results and to bring their own business data into the mix to further improve results.
For example, Optmyzr can suggest geo bid adjustments while you’re doing smart bidding on Google ads (check out the video below) or use product margin data to enable bidding for profitability, taking things a step further than Google’s target ROAS.
But in working with thousands of advertisers to help take their bid management to the next level, we noticed a fair bit of confusion stemming from the fact that there are 11 types of Google bid strategies that each interact differently with campaign and ad group bid adjustments.
Here’s a fairly common example of why there is confusion: as advertisers transition between bid management strategies, it’s not always obvious which bid adjustments still matter so advertisers with a target ROAS strategy continue to spend time on setting demographic bid adjustments. This is unfortunately a complete waste of time as those bid adjustments are simply ignored by Google.
Advertisers don’t realize they’re wasting time because bid adjustments can be added in the Google Ads interface but depending on the selected bid strategy they may be ignored without warning.
While Optmyzr points out these issues with our Policy and Audit Report, we wanted to help demystify this for all advertisers regardless of whether or not they use Optmyzr so we worked with Google and PPCers on Twitter (shout outs to @BertOnckelinx and @navahf) to create a table of interactions between bid strategies and bid adjustments.
We’ve documented the places in the Google Help Center where our findings came from and tested the settings ourselves. Some of Google’s help materials offer conflicting statements but we’ve done our best to reflect what we see in the real world. Google Ads is constantly evolving so please get in touch with us if you have a suggestion for how to make the table better.
[Click here to see a larger version](https://www.optmyzr.com/forestry/interactions-of-bid-strategies-table.webp) of this image.
Google Help Center References:
1. Unlike bid adjustments for manual CPC, your bid adjustments for Target CPA modify the value of your CPA target, rather than the bids themselves.
2. Because Target ROAS helps optimize your bids based on real-time data, your existing bid adjustments are not used. There is one exception: You can still set mobile bid adjustments of -100%. Note that you don’t need to remove bid adjustments—they just won’t be used.
4. Smart Bidding will use your audiences as signals to bid more efficiently and help get you more conversions and conversion value. Bid adjustments work differently when you’ve applied a conversion-based automated bid strategy and the campaign or ad group contains multiple lists with overlapping users. Rather than adjusting your bids, your bid adjustments will instead prioritize the audience list to which an impression, click, etc. will be attributed.
5. ECPC automatically takes into account different conversion rates for all types of traffic but sets bids separately for mobile devices. This means you don’t need to set any bid adjustments (aside from mobile) for ECPC to maximize conversions. However, if you want to bid more aggressively for certain types of traffic you can still choose to set a bid adjustment. This adjustment will be applied on top of ECPC’s automatic adjustments.
6. Google does not recommend setting bid adjustments unless those adjustments are being made for reasons that wouldn’t be captured in the conversions such as LTV.
7. Starting in late June 2019, advertisers will no longer be able to add new Target Search Page Location or Target Outranking Share bid strategies. Later this year, existing campaigns still using these strategies will automatically be migrated to the Target Impression Share strategy based on previous target locations and historical impression share.
Not all clicks are created equal — some are more likely to convert than others. In the days of manual CPC bidding this meant that PPC specialists had to adjust bids to account for these differences in expected conversion rates. They might have set geo bid adjustments to bid more in Germany and less in Switzerland or to bid higher on mobile devices than on desktops.
But then Smart Bidding (Google’s name for its most advanced version of automated bidding) came along and many bid adjustments stopped working the way advertisers expected. We covered how different bid adjustments interact with different bid strategies in a previous post.
Let’s see how Value Rules, the shiny new toy from Google Ads, works to restore bid adjustments for automated bids and, most importantly, how to use this new tool correctly for optimal results.
You can now adjust conversion values based on characteristics like location, device, and audience to help optimize your campaigns!
Value Rules let you set bid adjustments for Smart Bidding
Value Rules were announced at Google Marketing Live 2019 and finally came out of beta in late summer of 2021. Value Rules let advertisers create rules to adjust conversion values whereas bid adjustments simply adjust CPCs. So how then are Value Rules a replacement for bid adjustments you might ask.
Remember that smart bidding automatically sets the appropriate CPC bid every time a search is done for your ad. This real-time bid is based on the expected value the click may produce and the advertiser’s target return on ad spend (tROAS).
In a simple example, if Google expects the click has a 10% chance of leading to a $100 sale, then that click is worth $10 (0.10 * $100 = $10). Combine that with a tROAS of 200% (i.e. make $2 for every $1 spent on ads), then the CPC bid will be $5 (i.e. this $5 click is expected to create $10 of value).
For this auction:
Click’s value is estimated at $10
tROAS is 200%
Automatically set a bid of $5
If user clicks, advertiser pays up to $5 and is expected to get $10 of value, hence ROAS is 200%
With Value Rules, you could tell Google that the conversion value would be double. By doubling the conversion value in the example above, you will end up setting double the CPC.
For the same auction, now with a Value Rule:
Value Rules says conversion value is double
Click’s value is estimated at $20 instead of $10
tROAS is 200%
Automatically set a bid of $10 instead of $5
If user clicks, advertiser pays up to $10 and is expected to get $20 of value, hence ROAS is 200%
As you can see, a Value Rule that doubles the value reported for a conversion is effectively the same as creating a bid adjustment of 2x.
Don’t use Value Rules the same way as bid adjustments
Now here’s the important thing. While you could use Value Rules as a straight-up replacement for bid adjustments, you should NOT because you’d be doubling up on what Google’s automated bidding is already doing for you.
Remember bid adjustments are way to manipulate bids when you’re doing the bidding process manually so let’s review that manual process for a minute. First, how are CPC bids typically derived? Say you expect 10% of clicks to fill out your lead gen form, and each form fill is worth $100 to your business, then your CPC bid would be $10 (0.10 * $100).
Next, how are bid adjustments decided? You’d look at your conversion numbers in Google Ads and notice that customers in Germany convert at a 20% higher rate, 12% instead of 10% of the time. So you set a +20% bid adjustment for clicks from Germany. Hence your $10 bid becomes a $12 bid when the user is in Germany (0.10 * 120% * $100 = $12).
Now here’s the rub… With smart bidding, Google already knows this difference in expected conversion rate so it will already set a $12 bid. This is true because the data you used to decide a 20% bid adjustment is the exact same data Google already gets from you when you use conversion tracking.
The bottom line is that creating a Value Rule to adjust bids based on expected conversion rates will simply stack bid adjustments and get you to bid incorrectly. So please don’t.
Remember, Google removed Broad Match Modified keywords because 95% of advertisers were using it wrong and getting results that weren’t intended. Let’s not go down that same path.
How to use Value Rules to optimize PPC campaigns
Value Rules are tremendously useful as a form of bid adjustments for smart bidding if you use the right data to create your rules.
A good rule will be based on something you haven’t told Google.
It turns out that there’s a lot advertisers know about their business that they’re not communicating to Google through the conversion tracking pixel, seasonality adjustments or different targets.
Let’s go back to our example with German customers. While we already told Google they convert 20% better than typical, what happens after the conversion? Do they typically have a higher lifetime value? Or do these conversions result in more store visits because you have more stores per capita in Germany than in other places?
We started with ‘not all clicks are created equal’, now we have ‘not all conversions are created equal’. Value Rules give us a way to communicate these differences in conversion quality.
How to use Value Rules
Value Rules are set at the account level. The rules can be based on location (physical or location of interest), device, or audience.
For audience, advertisers can choose between who the user is, what they’re interested in, what they’re actively searching or planning, and how they’ve interacted with your business.
Rules can be based on just one of the three types of segments, or combinations of up to two segments. Once advertisers pick the types for their first rule, all other rules must use the same two segment types. For example, if the first rule combines location and audience type, then all following rules must also use location and audience and it won’t be possible to create rules using device types.
There is a nice preview of rules, and the ‘If x, Then y’ methodology should already be very familiar to Optmyzr users of our very powerful PPC Rule Engine.
The action of a rule is to manipulate the reported conversion value by incrementing it by a set amount or multiplying it by a certain factor.
For example, if a user is located in the US and works in the tech industry, then add 5 to the value that was reported by the conversion pixel. Or, if a user is located in the Netherlands and regardless of audience, then multiply the reported value by 0.8.
The resulting rules will look something like this in Google.
Alternatives to Value Rules
As I’ve explained before, Value Rules are a less precise way to communicate conversion quality to Google than alternatives such as offline conversion tracking or value adjustments. But they are much simpler to use than the alternatives so they’re a great next step for advertisers who previously haven’t optimized their accounts by optimizing how they report conversions.
Value Rules in Optmyzr
Optmyzr will have an innovative new approach to creating Value Rules very soon, so drop our support team a line if you’d like to be one of the first to test it out.
Google Value Rules FAQ: How It Really Works
Updated August 26, 2021
Google’s Value Rules are a great feature for advertisers who want more control over automated bidding but who don’t want to set up the more complex offline conversions or value adjustment systems.
We got several questions related to this feature so here’s a roundup of the most popular ones. We’ll continue to amend this post as new information about Value Rules becomes available.
Do reports show different conversion values when using value rules?
Yes, the ‘conversion value’ column will show adjusted values throughout your entire account for search, shopping, and display campaigns.
This means that if you send reports to your boss or client with conversion values, these values will be ‘incorrect’ after enabling value rules. How you define ‘correct’ is up to you but there will be a change in how values are calculated and this could create issues with reporting.
We recommend having a conversation with your stakeholders before enabling value rules. Alternatively, you can use automated reporting tools like those offered by Optmyzr, to use value rules to improve bidding (using adjusted conversion values).
Are conversion values retroactively updated?
Values start being adjusted from the moment you create your value rules. Previously reported values will not be changed.
How can I see my original conversion values?
To see the unadjusted conversion values, in other words, the conversion value as if you had no value rules, enable the segment “Conversions → Value Rule Adjustment” on the account or campaign overview page.
After doing this, you’ll see a new segment for “original value (no rule applied) for any account or campaign that has a non-zero conversion value.
If a conversion satisfies multiple value rules, which one is used?
Amy Bishop explained this really well in her post about value rules. This is the order in which rules are applied:
For locations, the rule for the most granular location is used i.e. the rule for San Francisco takes precedence over the rule for California.
For audiences, Google will try rules in the following order:
Customer Match
Remarketing & Similar Audiences
Affinity & In-Market Audiences
Detailed Demographics
If there is a tie in an audience segment, Google will choose a rule using the “multiply” logic over the “add” rule.
If any other tie remains, they will choose the rule with the highest adjustment.
Is there really a 1:1 relationship between a bid adjustment and a value rule?
Nice article Fred, thanks. I'm wondering though, is the conversion modifier and bid modifier confirmed by Google to be a 1:1 relationship? I'm a bit doubtful about that. -->"By doubling the conversion value in the example above, you will end up setting double the CPC."
This is a great question from Mike Ryan who really knows the details of PPC. And he’s right that setting a value rule is not necessarily the exact equivalent of setting a bid adjustment.
Here’s why: Value rules change the value of a conversion that is reported to Google. Google’s machine learning algorithms then use these self-reported conversion values to predict the probable value of future conversions.
But remember Google considers over 500,000 signals from each auction to make this prediction.
And while the advertiser may have adjusted the value they reported because they really like conversions from California, the ML system may instead find other factors (like time of day) that correlate with these high conversion values. Rather than bid higher because the user is in California, it bids higher because the user is searching at night.
Value rules are set at the account level and change the values for all reported conversion values for search, shopping and display campaigns. The rules will change the values regardless of the bid management style of the campaign.
If a campaign is using tROAS, maximize conversion value or is a smart shopping campaign, then the adjusted conversion values will impact how Google determines bids. They will continue to consider only those conversion actions included in conversions (this is a setting for each conversion action).
What is the range of allowed adjustments?
A rule can change the original value of a conversion by a factor ranging from 0.5x to 10x. Alternatively, advertisers can choose to add a static value to a conversion that meets the conditions of the rule.
A couple of weeks ago, Google’s developer blog carried a hidden announcement: Google Ads is going to retire their Target CPA (tCPA) and Target ROAS (tROAS) Smart Bidding strategies.
Starting in April 2021, these functionalities will be merged with other existing bid strategies.
For most advertisers, the only difference will be to switch to a bidding strategy with a different name with no impact on performance. But to be safe, you should review your account setup and monitor it for irregularities during this shift.
What is Google changing?
Starting from April 2021, advertisers will not be able to create outright tROAS or tCPA bid strategies. Instead, there will be two new fields: one to add a target CPA for the ‘Maximize Conversions’ strategy, and another for target ROAS for the ‘Maximize Conversion Value’ strategy.
That means tCPA and tROAS strategies will get fully absorbed by these new avatars.
Here’s what Google shopping specialist Kirk Williams has to say about this change:
What it means for advertisers
If you use Smart Bidding, you’ll have to start using a different setting to achieve your CPA and ROAS goals. Since advertisers who use Target ROAS for Smart Shopping campaigns are effectively already using a Maximize Conversion Value strategy with a tROAS, the search version will naturally start to look a bit like this.
This table shows the new settings that will be equivalent to the ones you may be using today:
One more thing. We know that the ads auction uses cost-per-click pricing, even with tCPA or tROAS. While Google’s automated bidding helps advertisers buy more of the clicks that have a predicted conversion rate or conversion value, combined with the CPC, it will help advertisers meet their targets for CPA or ROAS.
Creating budget constraints
How bidding strategies work depends on their constraints. So what can you do when both Target CPA/ROAS and your budget act as constraints?
In the past, Google recommended that advertisers with the old tCPA strategy and a constrained budget either remove the budget constraint (by increasing the budget), or switch to the old Maximize Conversions strategy. This obviously won’t work when tCPA and Maximize Conversions are merged and become the same.
Which means that after the transition, advertisers using Maximize Conversions with a tCPA setting and a constrained budget should either raise their budget or remove the CPA setting.
Why Maximize Conversions should not have a target CPA and a limited budget
PPC pro Martin Röttgerding has an interesting perspective on what might happen if advertisers run their bid strategy with two constraints:
A Maximize Conversions strategy is pretty set on buying as many conversions as possible. When you remove budget constraint, this goal will then turn to buying every single conversion, which is risky as you won’t have any guards against exceedingly high incremental costs per conversion.
If there is a limited budget for this strategy, then it will only keep buying the next cheapest conversion until the budget is spent. Introducing a target CPA constraint on the top will only set conflicting goals as the system could either buy more conversions for lower prices or fewer conversions closer to your target CPA.
When you introduce conflicting goals, you lose control over the system. It might decide to prioritize one goal today and the other tomorrow. And when your results aren’t what you expected, it’s hard to track down the reason as the system doesn’t tell you what it tried to do.
If you’re going to use Maximize Conversions with tCPA setting for a budget-constrained campaign, at the very least you need to monitor the quality of conversions after the switch.
Review your conversions
When a conversion is cheap, it means that not many advertisers value that conversion enough and so there’s little competition for it. And in turn, Google marks that low-value conversion and makes it available at a lower price. So when you use Maximize Conversions with no tCPA setting, you may be buying some of the conversions that are of less value to others.
The only way out of this? Help Google understand what you truly value in a conversion. Use the offline conversion import (OCI) to tell Google which conversions were more or less valuable to you. This will help their machines target more of the good kind of conversions.
What to do if you use Optmyzr
With the sunset of tCPA and tROAS bid strategies, we don’t expect to see much change in terms of how bids are managed. However, there are a few things we recommend Optmyzr users do to get ahead of things.
As a precaution, set up automated alerts to monitor performance anomalies. Use the budget optimization tools in Optmyzr to make sure that budget settings aren’t suffocating profitable campaigns.
As we wait for Google’s official response, we’ll keep updating our prebuilt strategies in the Rule Engine to help Optmyzr users manage this transition more easily.
Advertisers with existing rules using older strategies will need to start revising their setup. If you aren’t sure what to do, contact our support team or your account manager for assistance. We’ll also reach out to any users who’ll be impacted by these changes to let you know what to do as we get closer to the window when Google plans to remove these strategies entirely.
When we think about bid management of our keywords and product groups, there are key areas that every marketer concentrates on. For example, targeting the right ROAS/CPA, ensuring that impression share is not lost, not losing the top spots to your competitors, giving lower bids to expensive or non-converting keywords, and so on.
While it’s right to focus on optimizations for setting the bids correctly, marketers should not forget other areas that need their attention as well.
Here are some areas where marketers shouldn’t be limiting themselves to bid management to tackle common problems:
• My conversions are best in the middle of the day. So, I want to increase my bids during that time and put them back to normal for the rest of the day.
• On some days, costs for clicks are much higher than expected from some locations. Can we monitor Avg. CPC each hour for some locations and reduce bids when these clicks become expensive?
• I’m overspending my budget for the day, so I would like to reduce my bids during the second half of the day.
• My bids are on the higher side, which exhausts my budget by the middle of the day and I end up overspending each day every month. And, if I reduce my bids, my clicks and conversions drop.
It’s important to know the right thing to do for each of the above use-cases. Let’s wrap these pain points with the right solutions.
1. Spread out your budget throughout the day.
Keep your bids as it is and implement hourly bid adjustments. Analyze historical data and find the times in the day which spend more and which perform better as well. So, you need to apply bid adjustments for different times of the day based on your goal.
One way to get started would be to look at the times of the day when your conversion rate is high and check the impression share during those specific times. If you have a low impression share, it means that you aren’t able to drive as much traffic as you could for high-performing hours.
To fix this, increase the bid adjustments to grab more traffic. At the same time, for the time slots which don’t convert – apply negative bid adjustments or disable those time slots to not serve ads at all. This is like load-shedding – wipe out budgets during some time slots of the day and keeping it for the times of the day when you expect better performance.
2. Don’t overspend your daily budget.
Use a budget tracker – to have a way to not exceed a given budget amount each day even if Google allows spending 200% of your daily budget. You can use solutions like Flexible Budget script at Optmyzr. The script runs automatically every hour to check the cost you’ve spent until the hour of the day and pause the account/campaign when the target budget is spent. Learn more.
3. Analyze the lost impression share.
Before dropping the ball, it is very important to identify if it was the budget or ad rank (bid) that limited the performance of your account/campaign. Sometime back, a Digital Marketer shared with me that they’ve been increasing bids for high performing keywords to improve their impression share to 85% from current ~60% Impression share – but with no success.
On analyzing their account’s performance with PPC Investigator, we found that increasing the bids didn’t help because they were losing impressions due to budget constraints and not the bid. Learning from this? While you increase the bids – don’t forget to check if you’re losing impression share because of insufficient budget allotment.
4. Go granular – manage bids for each keyword.
Don’t limit yourself to set bids only at the ad group or campaign level. While you find high-performing keywords that perform better, it’s equally important to find keywords that are bleeding money.
If you can identify the underperforming keywords and reduce bids on them, it will allow you to provide more budget towards better-performing keywords which will last for a longer period of the day and get you better results at the same time.
Conclusion
What advertisers forget is that each time that a new bid is set, Google takes time to test it and bring you results based on the changes. So, if you change the bids too frequently, you might very well be hampering the learning cycle and eventually the results.
The solution? You need to give your bids room to breathe and check out the other factors which you need to be concerned about apart from just setting your bids again and again.
It’s true: the right bidding strategy can decide the fate of your PPC accounts.
With the ever-changing dynamics of search marketing, marketers need to be extra careful navigating the tough waters of bid management. Moreover, they also need to be conscious of Google’s take on limiting search query reports and pushing new limits on data access.
In order to gain big on leads, we have to do more than just focusing on bidding strategies. Metrics like quality score, tCPA, ROAS, etc., can also play a big role in influencing bid management.
So this week on episode 23 of PPC Town Hall, we discussed tips and tactics by specialists to improve your bid management for good lead generation and e-commerce.
Our panelists for the week:
Navah Hopkins, Director of Paid Media, Hennessey Digital
Frederick Vallaeys, Co-Founder, Optmyzr
Geetanjali Tyagi, Co-Founder, Optmyzr
As always, you can view this week’s episode as well as previous editions of PPC Town Hall right here.
Here are 5 tips that experts swear by to manage bids for leads and e-commerce.
1. The changing face of Search Terms Reports
Navah: Initially, when it was announced that the Search Terms Reports were being depreciated, I didn’t think much of it. Ultimately, you’re still gonna be able to see the click data, the keyword data, and your ROASes. It’s not that you’re getting fewer clicks, you’re just not getting that transparency on the queries.
But now, I think it is an actual problem as I have noticed an under-spending issue. Not being able to see where the budget is being funneled is really a problem. My theory is that a lot of the spend is being directed to local service ads rather than paid search. Local service ads come at a dramatic discount, without any pre-requirement of running a paid search ad.
Apart from this, there is no transparency for different automation strategies that are either underperforming or overperforming.
2. SKAGs vs STAGs
Navah: Lately, I’ve been pushing far more broad match ad groups and campaigns, especially with how much the match types have changed. The allocation of budget to broad match and exact match keywords seems much higher than phrase match keywords. Now, I’m finding one broad match skag, 3-4 exact match keywords, and then maybe one mod broad serves better than focusing on only exact/phrase.
The choice to use a match type or a keyword is entirely dependent on what I’ll see coming back in search terms. Did they match by the rules of exact? Or did exact close variants matched by the rules of broad, etc.,? The fact that we no longer have that visibility truly, is a bit of a problem.
In terms of delivery in account performance, I still see that STAGs (grouping of keywords) seems to perform better than SKAGs. In terms of match type, I’m very much pulling away from phrase match as they tend to get caught quite more in the delivery problem.
Fred: Match types don’t mean what they used to be earlier. With the loosening of the match types, most people can not figure out what a phrase match can achieve that another match type wouldn’t. For people, who haven’t been doing PPC quite that long, a phrase match meant that the words between the quotes were supposed to stay together. But that doesn’t actually work anymore.
Geetanjali: With the whole match types changing and close variants coming in, people who swear by SKAGs have still not completely let go. With the search terms changes, the whole alpha-beta structure of mining keywords using your broad match and then moving them to exact might not work that well. You probably don’t know all the search queries that are coming in with your broad match keywords, whether it’s SKAG or otherwise.
3. Let’s talk bidding
Navah: Bidding is one of those tactics that you should just delegate out. There isn’t a good reason to do truly manual bidding. Manual bidding can be helpful when you don’t trust native automation to bid enough for your important terms, however, there is no good reason to sit there adjusting bids all day. Use scripts/rules, or you can use an amazing tool like Optmyzr.
Geetanjali: If you are using smart bidding, it’s really important to send the right data into the system. I also think that having the right level of attribution is needed as well. I have come across customers who are completely using Google’s automated bidding strategies and running on last-click attribution. So, the system is automatically cutting the queries that would rise on top of the funnel, conversions and these customers keep wondering why it’s not working.
Also, if you’re delegating your bidding, you need to know which parts you’d be choosing. If you still have to set the right targets, you still have to have the attribution model, then that’s the part that you can’t delegate to Google. If you don’t give the system the right data, the systems, which are after all machines, can’t make the right decision.
4. The problem with AI and Maximize Conversions
Navah: Two things play here. One, in your Conversion settings, you can tell Google whether to count in your conversions or not. This means you can still track actions you’re interested in without having them derail your automated/smart bidding strategies. The other thing is don’t use smart bidding if you don’t trust your conversions. Just don’t.
You actually need to have an infrastructure in place that can track the lead through. Have an open conversation with your client about their intake. Part of it comes down to helping your client and helping them build infrastructure to report and have an internal intake system. The other part is doing the legwork yourself, having call tracking metrics, checking lead quality, etc.
5. Quality of leads
Navah: We need to understand the quality of leads in accepted leads against rejected leads and why they get rejected. One thing that we found in new advertisers is that a penchant for leaving search partners on and getting conversions. But then those conversions turn out really terrible.
We make sure that every quarter that there is this buy-in and we ask some core questions. How many leads are you getting per month? Where could that number grow to? How much do you make per service vertical? Are there any upcoming changes in this quarter that we need to be aware of?
Conclusion
I’ve noticed that as newer PPC managers come in who have never done manual bid management, they lack the understanding of how to manage bids or how the auctions work.
For some reason, people tend to believe that putting in a bid or a target for tCPA or tROAS is enough to walk away. That’s certainly not okay. Google is automating the conversions between expected conversion when you’re trying to achieve in terms of CPA and putting the bids in the auction.
But remember this: it doesn’t look at anything to do with your business! It doesn’t necessarily know all the things about your business as you do. At the end of the day, your priority in the type of leads you want should be reflected in your targets.
Keep in mind that nothing is fixed as we know them to be. Keep testing and discussing ways to make the most of your accounts.
Seasoned PPC professionals turn to efficient bid management tools, like Optmyzr, to keep their accounts top-notch and drive good leads. Try and experience our capabilities yourself by signing up for our 14-day free trial. Full access to all our features, credit card free!
Imagine if your bank let you transfer money to people but made it difficult to decide who receives your transfers. Pretty silly, right?
Despite the objections of every advertiser ever, it’s still not easy to tune many aspects of your campaigns in Google Ads. So it was pretty much second nature that we stepped up to make the experience better for our customers.
Bid adjustments — using audience analytics and insights to regulate ad performance — are invaluable. But you can’t overlook the time-consuming chore that is bid management through Google’s engine. The challenge is even greater when it comes to setting placements, especially the ever-popular ‘exclude all mobile apps’ preference.
Those are the two key areas of our recent Rule Engine updates designed to help account managers and PPC strategists speed things up. Let’s take a look at what’s new, where to find the updates, and how you can use them.
New in Geo Bid Adjustment and Placements
Simply put, these updates take the form of instant strategies in the Rule Engine, Optmyzr’s logic-driven rule builder that uses ‘if-then’ statements to get your account to take a specific action when certain conditions are met.
These new strategies are:
Find Expensive Cities: Reduce bid adjustments for cities that have a higher CPA than the campaign average, or that have no conversions despite having more clicks than are typically required for at least 1 conversion.
Find New Cities: Find out which cities are starting to direct traffic to your campaigns in the last 14 days (compared to the previous period).
Target Cost per Click: Set geo bid adjustments based on the target CPC you wish to achieve. Available at the country, region, and city levels.
Target Cost per Conversion: Set geo bid adjustments based on the target CPA you wish to achieve. Available at the country, region, and city levels.
Exclude Mobile Apps With Zero Conversions: Find all mobile apps with no conversions and exclude them as placements in bulk.
While our instant strategies come with recommended settings, they can be further customized and automated using your own preferences. If you’re familiar with how the Rule Engine works, you can create your own geo bid adjustment and placement strategies from scratch — all the components are there.
Other Geo Bid Adjustment and Placement features
The Geo Bid Adjustments tool analyzes campaign performance in different locations and makes recommendations for bid adjustments. You can implement adjustments at the country, region, city, and zip/pin code level. This tool also lets you discover new cities based on traffic and target them according to ROAS or CPA.
With Placements Exclusion, you can customize your strategy to prevent showcasing your ads at random in the Google Display Network. No more manually excluding apps one by one. Bypass the limits of Google Ads and remove your ads from showing via the entire mobile apps category.
Optmyzr Tip:Stop wasting money on bids and sites that don’t yield profit or returns. These tools give you more granular control over campaign behavior based on geolocations and ad placement. You can use a mix of custom and instant strategies in the Rule Engine to improve your ad performance or use these tools for research before you even build and run a campaign.
Use cases for Geo Bid Adjustments
1. Account for holidays or other closures
Depending on your industry and location, some events lead to virtually zero-sale days with customers focused on things other than shopping. With Geo Bid Adjustments, you can now mark those locations and lower your bid to account for those lulls in activity. Customize the bids to -90% to keep the campaign running but with reduced ad spend.
2. Track cities with wasted ad spend
Throughout your campaign, you might find some locations don’t provide enough conversions for the number of clicks they show for. These might be areas where the cost per conversion is higher than the campaign average, resulting in potentially wasted spend. Now you can just use the ‘Find Expensive Cities’ instant strategy in Rule Engine, and customize your initial campaign actions to exclude these cities or create bid adjustments for those locations. Or, you can use the strategy as an alert system to be notified of locations that put out a higher CPA.
3. Discover potential target locations
Due to erratic lockdowns and reopenings across the globe, businesses might start receiving traffic from newer locations where they didn’t drive sales in the past. You need a system to account for any possible new traffic. With the ‘Find New Cities’ strategy, you can find locations that showed traffic in the last 14 days but not before. Run this strategy twice a month to track any new traffic and find new areas of interest.
Use Cases for Display Placements
1. Target placements with a specific bid
While running a Display campaign without any targeted placements, you’ll see that the engine will automatically place you where it thinks your ad may perform best based on past data. With the Display Placements Exclusion tool, you can identify sites (or placements) where you’re doing well and customize your strategies to target these in future campaigns.
2. Bid lower for placements with bad ROAS or CPA
Most ad placements on mobile devices happen below the fold, and the chances that people scroll down to even see to your ads are extremely thin. Your placements might not have enough viewability and will therefore have poor ROAS or CPA. With this same tool, you can see suggestions for such weak placements and lower your bid on them to prevent spending on low-converting traffic.
3. Exclude placements on all apps or a specific operating system
While some apps are great to advertise on, others tend to have an audience who won’t benefit from your ad at all. With the Placements Exclusion instant strategy, you can stop your ads from showing on all mobile apps and even certain operating systems.
Conclusion
Between our new Rule Engine strategies and existing tools, Optmyzr allows you to truly control and optimize your campaigns beyond what Google’s automated rules will enable. This makes search marketers the final authority and allows you to layer multiple powerful automations to support your campaigns efficiently.
Analyze data based on preferred date ranges and other metrics to arrive at what’s best for your business, and focus your time on building excellent strategies rather than performing repetitive tasks.
Save time, save ad spend, and take control back from Google.
During my 5 years as a PPC strategist, I’ve learned that the most common dilemma marketers face is choosing between automated and manual bidding.
While many other factors also come into the picture — budgets and targets, for example — choosing an efficient bidding strategy is the undisputed winner.
So let’s dive right into how we find the solution. Here are 4 proven tips I’ve seen PPC managers use to control automated bidding.
While Smart Bidding looks more agile, it may not be as robust as you’d like it to be. This is because the automated system may not wait long enough to adjust bids. Those bids might be set based on new patterns, leading to potential anomalies.
So do you rely on Google’s Smart Bidding to get the best results? Or should you roll up your sleeves and take responsibility for manually driving the best results?
In my experience, the answer is a combination of the two.
Experts say that your choice of bidding strategy should depend on how much time you can devote to PPC management and your goals.
But according to a more recent train of thought from our CEO Fred Vallaeys, marketers should train automated bidding strategies to get better results — something likely to resonate with the world’s most renowned PPC practitioners.
As you rely on automated bidding strategies to stay agile (especially in the current scenario), add your own expertise and understanding of the market to strengthen Google’s automation.
The solution: Pick the right automated bidding strategy and train it to get your desired results efficiently. That means feeding it the right settings, like Target CPA and Target ROAS, at a very granular level.
1. Don’t be afraid to switch strategies to get more control
Here’s my golden tip: Don’t set it and forget it.
Automation is only as good as what you feed it. You may start a campaign to achieve one thing, but don’t leave it there. Monitor its performance regularly, and when you don’t see the desired output, you can easily switch to the next strategy.
For example, when you want to generate conversions rather than get clicks, you’d choose the “Maximize Conversions” bidding strategy. After running that for 30 days or exhausting your budget, you can gauge the performance of your campaigns.
When you have a tool like Optmyzr, the next step is to check out performance using the Rule Engine strategy shown below. And if you’ve had enough conversions — say 50 in 30 days — you can switch to a more specific strategy like “Target CPA” or “Target ROAS”.
This is because the campaign is already able to spend more than its daily budget. In that scenario, taking control of the target values for CPA or ROAS can improve performance even further.
2. Get granular
Align campaigns based on the goals and strategies you intend to use for optimization, right from the beginning. Think of it as a more futuristic approach to preparing your campaigns for a bidding strategy like “Target CPA” or “Target ROAS” from the beginning.
If you have different margins for the brand, categories of products, product types, or location targets you’re advertising for, then group them separately.
3. Update your targets
Google allows you to set the target values for “Target CPA” and “Target ROAS” bidding strategies. Make use of this flexibility.
If you set one bidding target for all of your ad groups, it’s akin to expecting all the fingers on your hand to do the same thing.
One target for all your ad groups is likely to limit their performance, and you may also prevent Google’s machine from optimizing the best results for your different ad groups. Instead, optimize your target values based on each ad group’s current performance.
While automated bidding strategies may work for most of your campaigns, it might not be the solution in every scenario. Keep your options open.
Using Optmyzr, you can set up automation to find campaigns where automated bidding didn’t fare well. Switch them to a control group of campaigns where you can run manual bidding strategies.
Check out the image below showing how to find those campaigns using our Rule Engine:
Conclusion
Automated bidding strategies are a good foundation, but it’s the PPC strategist’s role to make them smarter. Analyze, introspect, and always be prepared to shift bidding strategies if you aren’t moving the needle on your goals.
And as you switch to other bidding strategies, keep in mind that the accumulation of data points over a period of time can guide Google’s engine to drive the best results for you.
Optimizing your strategies on automated bidding isn’t always simple, but Optmyzr can help you shave hours off execution. Our tools layer automation over what the ad engines provide, helping you leverage automated bidding while staying in control.
When it comes to my clients, I have noticed a clear distinction between the winners and losers of e-commerce during this crisis.
The changes in the consumer landscape, as a result of the Coronavirus, are affecting different industries in seemingly polar opposite ways. The current state of commerce can be either a major advantage or disadvantage for performance, depending on industry and business model.
While e-tailers are quickly adjusting strategies to deal with the current environment, the major players in the advertising space are also changing the rules. Both Amazon and Google have made strategic changes to their advertising models, changing the game for everyone.
The majority of businesses I support are in the retail industry, split among e-commerce retailers, manufacturers and lifestyle brands. I have noticed a major divergence across these categories in terms of direct-to-consumer PPC performance.
The customers I would classify in the manufacturing and lifestyle brand category have struggled with reduced search volumes and lower conversion rates. These brands often have a strong DTC presence, but direct-to-consumer isn’t their primary channel of distribution.
The biggest challenge that these brands face is that they do not have the breadth of incoming search traffic the pure-play retailer group enjoys. A large portion of their incoming traffic is tied to high-intent brand queries, and many categories have seen these types of queries drop dramatically when brand and related search phrases are not as well aligned with the stay-at-home lifestyle.
In order to make up for the short-term headwinds, these brands have had to increase short-term promotional activity as well as shift more advertising dollars from a bottom-of-funnel strategy to a full-funnel or mid-funnel strategy, which traditionally require that they accept a lower direct ROI on ad spend.
The good news is that in most cases, the traffic for these branded queries bottomed out in mid-March or early April and have shown consistent growth over the past several weeks. There is some reason to believe that some of the changes in search behavior will return to normal over the next several months.
On the other side of the ‘consumer behavior coin’ are e-commerce retailers I would classify as pure-play in the DIY, Hobby, Home Improvement and Gardening categories. The retailers I support in these categories have benefited from what has been called an “8-week-long Cyber Monday event”.
Transactions and revenue have rocketed to all-time highs, with a steady drumbeat of daily traffic up an average of 100% or more. This jump in traffic hasn’t all been roses, of course, as supply chain capacity has been drastically impacted by stay-at-home orders across the country and internationally.
Increased demand, combined with a less-than-fully-functioning supply chain has impacted stock rates and delivery times, putting a strain on e-tailers.
While the lift in transactions, clicks and revenue can be compared similarly to an extended Cyber Monday event, the change in average CPC is nothing like what we traditionally see during high-demand times.
During holidays, we typically see an increase in average CPC across the board, as the PPC landscape becomes more competitive. Currently, however, the pure-play e-commerce companies I support have seen a drastic drop in CPC.
During the most recent two weeks, these e-commerce companies have seen a drop in average CPC of 37%, with a median drop of 47%. This drop in average CPC, coupled with increased clicks and conversion, has increased ROI by as much as 300% for these companies.
Tip from Wes: If you haven’t yet, I suggest you start testing aggressive CPC changes immediately. If you are concerned about decreasing your site traffic, I suggest using theOptmyzr Rule Engineand set a rule that looks at clicks for rolling seven-day periods. If the clicks for the campaigns you are testing fall below a threshold, you can set your rule to update the bids accordingly.
The drop in CPC has of course been a managed adjustment but has not experienced the expected negative impact on clicks. In fact, the CPC to Click correlation is drastically less elastic than we have seen traditionally. I strongly suspect this is primarily due to a reduction in spending by competitors, with a change in Amazon’s advertising behavior having the most impact across the landscape for these companies.
This suspicion is supported by the data available in the Google Ads Auction Insight tool.
Whereas Amazon typically enjoys between 30-60% impression share in these industries, over the past two months Amazon has dropped off the board completely. This makes sense, as Amazon has also seen both increased order volume and distribution constraints, requiring them to focus on ‘essential services’. It makes complete sense that they would cut ad spending right now.
How long this ‘new normal’ will last is anyone’s guess, but recent changes to the Google Shopping platform suggest that Google is taking the change seriously. The drop in PPC advertisers combined with the increased search volume Amazon is enjoying has pushed Google to institute a more aggressive approach to fill its search listings.
Google recently announced that it would be opening up its shopping platform results, making the results presented on the Google Shopping tab free. While many of the high-volume placements (such as product carousels) will still be paid placements, Google will now be allowing anyone with a qualifying merchant center account to list products.
It will be very interesting to see how the next few months play out.
Will the traffic recovery for these consumer brands continue?
Will Amazon continue its apparent no-advertising policy in these ‘non-essential’ categories?
How will e-tailers, both pure-play as well as DTC channels for consumer brands, be impacted by the recent Google Shopping changes?
There are a lot of questions yet to be answered, but if we know anything for sure, it is that things are unlikely to go back to ‘normal’ anytime soon.
This article is a guest post by a representative from one of Optmyzr’s customers. The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of Optmyzr and its employees.
“Stacked bidding” or “Tiered Bidding” is a strategy in which the same keyword is added in multiple match types to better control costs. The closer a query is to a keyword, the higher the chance that it could lead to a conversion, hence the more an advertiser is willing to spend.
Looks simple… what’s the catch?
For this strategy to work, you need to keep the bids for each match type somewhat surrounding the same amount. For example, and as Frederick Vallaeys explained on this article from Search Engine Land, “if the exact match keyword’s max CPC is $1.00, the advertiser may want to bid 80 percent (or $0.80) for phrase match and 60 percent (or $0.60) for broad or modified broad match”.
The problems with tiered bidding usually result from when the bid is modified for one keyword, but not for its match type counterparts. This results in a confusing and very problematic issue, as the tiered bidding is no longer in place and you might end up with bids that you aren’t controlling, or which slip off your radar.
How to successfully manage tiered bids
At Optmyzr we’ve come up with a solution that puts together a custom recipe from our Rule Engine, its very own spreadsheet capability, an enhanced script, and automation, to create a hassle-free workflow for tiered bid management.
To get started, you’ll first need to use our Stacked Bids enhanced script, to define the ratio which you’d like to maintain between the different bids for the keywords in multiple match types. With this script, a spreadsheet will be generated with a list of keywords existing in multiple match types. By running this script regularly, you can find keywords in multiple match types with their current and expected bids.
After you’ve set this up, you can pull the same spreadsheet into the Rule Engine and create rules as shown below. These rules will let you set the bids for Phrase match and Broad match keywords to 80% and 60% of the Exact Match CPC respectively.
The output of this recipe will give you a list of suggestions of keywords added in multiple match types and the calculated new bids for them to maintain tiered bidding.
For example, you can find any Phrase match keyword which has its current bids higher than their Exact match type counterparts and set their bids to say 60% of the Exact Match keywords Max CPC (this will be automatically pulled in the spreadsheet).
With the Rule Engine’s automation capability, you can set this recipe to be run on a weekly basis and make sure your tiered bids are all set in place!
This custom solution was made using Optmyzr’s Rule Engine and Enhanced Scripts. If you need us to put this recipe in your account, please write to support@optmyzr.com and we’ll be more than happy to do so!
When it comes to Google Shopping Campaigns, there are different ways you can approach the bid management process.
At Optmyzr, we offer three tools that will help you manage shopping bids successfully. They have different focuses and vary by the granularity you’ll need. Whether you’re looking to manage more generic and standard changes in bids or to do so differently for that one specific product attribute, we’ve got you covered.
1. Shopping Bidder
One of these tools is the Shopping Bidder. With the Shopping Bidder, you can make rather standard and bulk modifications for bids based on performance. These bid changes can only be applied to product groups, and work by increasing or decreasing the current bid by a number or percentage.
You can also choose to set a new fixed bid. This tool is most useful for when you want to make changes like, for example, reduce the bids on all non-converting product groups by an X percentage, or set all new product groups at a specific initial bid.
2. Shopping Attribute Bidder
Based on how granular you want to go, at Optmyzr we also have the Shopping Bid by Attributes* tool, where you can combine performance data from your Google Ads account with the attributes in your merchant feed.
This means you can use a division such as Category 0 > Product Type 0 > Brand > Price to make different bid changes for every unique combination of the selected attributes. You can do this so long as you’re maintaining a GrIP structure, i.e. one product SKU per product group. (Try our Utility tool to Create a Grip structure)
3. Rule Engine
Another great tool to manage bids, and perhaps the most versatile one we have so far, is the Rule Engine*. The Rule Engine lets you change bids for product groups based on performance, and gives you a lot more flexibility in terms of comparing performance and setting bids.
The Rule Engine works with recipes that contain a set of rules you’ll define. These rules contain multiple conditions and associated actions, and all of the conditions must be met for the actions to be applied. For example, you can use our target ROAS, conversion rate, etc. to set bids for product groups.
The Rule Engine can even connect with your business data so you can start managing bids by margins or even by weather.
These three tools offer different, yet equally helpful ways of approaching shopping bid management, with different levels of complexity.
*The Bid by Attributes and Rule Engine tools are only available for Pro plan users, but as you can see both give a greater range of possibilities. If you’d like to try them, you can contact us at support@optmyzr.com.
We hosted a webinar to show how the Rule Engine can be used to automate bid management based on external data like sales tracked in a CRM, weather conditions, and conversion types.
You can watch the replay of that webinar here:
Map AdWords entities to external data
A key requirement for using external data is that we must be able to map it to an AdWords entity like a campaign, ad group, keyword, or product group. We do this by looking at the ID and name fields of every row in the spreadsheet.
For example, to be able to use campaign-level weather data, the spreadsheet must contain either the campaign name or the campaign ID on the row that has the weather data like temperature and cloud levels.
Resources to get started
To help you get started with the examples shown in the webinar, here are a few resources that help with the creation of the external data:
The Hour of the Week tool is an incredibly helpful way of visualizing the times and days of the week where your AdWords campaigns perform better. You can manage your bids based on which time slots have the best performance, and avoid wasting budget unnecessarily on those hours of the day when the return on investment is low.
After all, information is the key to success, right?
But wouldn’t it be great if you could not only see the information displayed, but also get recommendations based on your AdWords performance, and make a greatly useful task even easier? Well, luckily, we’re all about smooth efficiency! And that’s where the New Hour of the Week Biddercomes into place.
Our latest update to the Hour of the Week Bid Adjustment includes time-based bid adjustments based on your AdWords KPIs. The tool uses intelligence to tailor bid adjustment suggestions based on your goals. The recommendations are based on historical performance and estimated potential.
With the New Hour of the Week Bidder, you can:
Choose a goal that works for your business. Whether its increasing conversions, reducing cost per conversions or increasing traffic, we’ve got you covered!
Get bid adjustment recommendations based on historical analysis and expected performance, as well as seeing estimated change in traffic and conversions.
Performance and opportunity analysis for individual day parts, which will also allow you to edit day parts.
A small step for your bids, a giant leap for your budget!
I’m the engineer behind our recently announced Shopping Attribute Bidder and I would like to show you some of the benefits you can achieve by deploying a more granular structure for your product groups in shopping campaigns.
How bids work for Shopping Ads
In shopping campaigns, you set bids for product groups. However, not all product groups can get a bid. Why is that? It’s because product groups can be subdivided and the bid can only be set at the final level of subdivision.
Here’s an example where products have been segmented (subdivided) along a few dimensions: first by the category (‘electronics’ or ‘toys’). Electronics are subdivided further by ‘brand’, and toys are not subdivided further. The right column in green represents all other product categories and is called “Everything else” in AdWords. This is further subdivided by ‘used status’.
This segmentation can be shown as a tree:
What’s important here is that in the AdWords interface, each division is called a ‘product group’ but only the ones at the lowest level (the colored ones in the image above) can have a bid. We’ll call these ‘biddable product groups’.
Why AdWords has non-biddable product groups
So why does AdWords even have non-biddable product groups? It’s because the way they let advertisers do the subdivisions in the interface requires one subdivision at a time. In creating the tree, each level has to be subdivided individually.
Doing this is actually really really painful if you just want to build a logical division, for example, splitting all products by category 0, and then splitting all those by brand. AdWords supports 7 levels of subdivision but in the interface anything more than 2 levels is extremely manual.
If you need help with that, check out our super fast Shopping Campaign Builder tool. We’ve had advertisers create hundreds of ad groups and thousands of granular product groups in just minutes with it.
How to set unique bids per product (SKU) in Shopping Ads
How granularly you can set bids depends on how granular your biddable product groups are. So if you want very granular, SKU level bids, you must place each SKU in its own product group.
It’s a similar concept to SKAGs in search campaigns. SKAG stands for Single Keyword Ad Group. The name I came up with for the equivalent of a SKAG in shopping campaigns is the GRIP structure. GRIP stands for GRoup of Individual Products.
Let me show you two ways to split four SKUs (item IDs) into biddable product groups.
Here’s what your biddable product groups contain in a GRIP structure:
In the GRIP structure above, each individual shoe is placed in a product group. The same four products in a non-GRIP structure below are all grouped together based on a subdivision of something they have in common, in this case the fact they’re all sneakers.
In the GRIP structure, I can set a unique bid for each item I sell. In a non-GRIP structure, the bid for all four sneakers has to be the same.
Why the GRIP structure is good for bidding
With the Shopping Attribute Bidder tool I created, we can analyze AdWords performance for any attribute we have included in our Google Merchant Feed. For example, we could analyze how shoes of different sizes perform. Here’s what we might see in Optmyzr:
As you can see, size 11.5 shoes have an ROAS of 1361%. Size 10 shoes on the other hand haven’t sold anything so their ROAS is 0%.
In a non-GRIP structure, this useful insight cannot be acted on because shoes of different sizes exist in the same biddable product group.
In a GRIP structure, on the other hand, we can act on this insight:
What’s really cool is that your structure no longer limits your ability to act on insights. If you want to analyze performance by brand or color, that would work just as easily. Here we use the GRIP structure to change bids for things that are red:
And here we change bids for products from a certain brand:
Not only can you now analyze data using attributes not available in AdWords (we do this by merging your merchant feed with the AdWords reports in our systems), you can even combine attributes to find more granular insights.
Changing bids for GRIP ads
It was important for us to give you the ability to act on insights right from the page where you got the insight. Here’s what the Shopping Attribute Bidder tool looks like when you’ve found an insight that you want to use for a bid change:
The analysis here looks at price ranges of products, something the advertiser has entered using a custom attribute. We can see performance data for each attribute. When products with the same attribute have different bids, we show each bid so that you can raise or lower them all by a percentage or a fixed amount.
Conclusion
I see a lot of e-commerce advertisers with sub-optimal product groups. That’s why I’m excited about the fact that with Optmyzr you can now more easily create a great shopping structure and use that to improve bid management. Try it out and let me and the team know what you think…
When you set up an AdWords campaign you choose the locations you want to target based on where your prospective customers are located. However, it is not enough to just target locations especially when campaign targeting is set up at the country level. One way to make sure you’re optimizing campaigns for better ROI is to identify high performing and underperforming locations and setting bid adjustments for those.
For example, if you’re targeting the United States as a country, you’ll receive traffic from different states. California and Alaska may have completely different performance metrics but under the current structure you’re probably managing them in the same manner. This is why it is important to use geo bid adjustments to manage bids or if you want more granular control over budget, you can split them out into separate campaigns as well.
Setting bid adjustments for locations
Performance data at the country, city and region level is available in AdWords under the dimensions tab. However, taking that data and making it actionable can take hours. This is where the Geo Bid Adjustment One-Click Optimization™ can help. This optimization lets you see data at the country, region, city and postal code level. You can analyze performance, add locations as targets and set bid adjustments in a few minutes. This process can be done for multiple campaigns at the same time. In AdWords, it will take 3-4 steps to do this for each campaign. When you have to do it for multiple campaigns, you can easily spend a few hours doing it.
Why use the Geo Bid Adjustment One-Click Optimization™?
View geographic performance at any level (country, city, region). For example, if California is added as a target location, you can choose to view data at the city level and see how campaigns are performing across different cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles etc.
Automatically calculate bid adjustments based on goals. You can enter the target goal value for the account or campaign and the system will automatically recommend bid adjustments based on performance.
Set bid adjustments for locations that are not added as targets. If you choose to add a bid adjustment for a location that you’re not targeting, the system will automatically add it as a target location and set the bid adjustment.
Use aggregate data to set bid adjustments for campaigns that don’t have enough data. You can use the overall performance of a location to set geo bid adjustments for campaigns that don’t have enough data to make a decision.
When shopping campaigns are split at a very granular level like product id, each product group may not have enough data to make a bid decision. This makes it difficult to optimize these product groups creating a chicken and egg problem. You can’t optimize without data and you won’t get traffic if bids are set too low. In such cases, it helps if you can group product groups to create a critical mass and use aggregated data to set bids for product groups. We recently launched the roll up feature in the Shopping Bidder One-Click Optimization™ that is designed to do this. It makes it easier to set bids at scale by aggregating data for product groups.
How does the roll up feature in Shopping Bidder work?
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The first step is to select the metric by which you want to roll up data and the second step is to set the threshold for that metric.
Step 1: Select the metric by which you want to group or aggregate data
Step 2: Set the threshold for that metric
Step 3: Click update
Understanding the results
The tool will roll up product groups to the lowest level that meets the data threshold selected. For example, if you select clicks as the metric and the threshold is set to 500, the tool will show all product groups that have at least 500 clicks. Product groups that don’t have 100 clicks will be rolled up to the lowest level at which the threshold is met.
Product groups are rolled up and grouped together at the lowest level. The number of product groups in the group show in brackets (n) next to the name.
Sometimes there are a lot of product groups in a single group but the range for max cpc is broad. In this case, the tool further breaks it down into sub groups that have a smaller max CPC range. This helps set bids at a more granular level. You can click on the rolled up product group to see sub groups.
The max CPC in this case shows the range (min – max) for all product groups under the roll up. If the new CPC requires the bid to be increased by a percentage, this is applied on the max number in the range.
We’ve been pretty excited about the launch of Google Shopping ads since they’re a great way for retailers to highlight their products’ photos and prices. Unfortunately when running Shopping ads for thousands of products, bid management using the AdWords interface is a full time job: not because it’s difficult, but simply because the interface is excruciatingly slow when managing many products that are split across many campaigns and ad groups.
After confirming that this was a real problem with some other PPC folks at the HeroConf conference last month, we started building a bid management tool for Shopping Ads and today we’re excited to reveal it to the world.
[][1]Optmyzr’s Shopping Bidder Tool for AdWords makes setting the correct CPC for your shopping ads a quick and easy process that can easily be done for thousands of product groups in a matter of mere minutes.
Here’s how our Shopping Bidder works:
You get all the biddable items for your entire account on a single page.
You can filter the view to see just ROI positive, ROI negative, or items with no impressions or you can apply a custom filter using your own criteria like clicks, cost, impressions, etc.
You can change bids in bulk for all the items that meet your filter criteria, for example, lower all bids 10% for ROI negative items with at least 10 clicks in the past 30 days.
With one click, you can send the new bids to AdWords where they go live instantly.
This is much, much faster than doing the same in AdWords which has a few shortcomings:
You cannot see all biddable items from your entire account on one page. You have to open up every ad group one by one.
There are no filters for product groups so you have to manually find items that meet your criteria for needing a bid change.
To change a bid it takes several clicks to expand the product groups until you get to the level where bids can be set.
Initially this tool will � make bid management for Shopping ads a lot faster but when it becomes this easy, you’ll also find yourself splitting up your product groups ever more granularly, and that should further improve results.
We’re really excited to have this ready for our users today and we hope you’ll send us feedback about how we can make this even more useful for you.
When keywords don’t appear on the first page of search results, you’re losing out on a lot of potential traffic. The First Page Bridger identifies keywords that are just shy of making the first page with your current bids. With just a small increase in the bid, they’ll catch the train to more impressions rather than fall in the gap where they’ll be relegated to second-page oblivion.
Google assigns the first-page bid to each keyword. This bid is an estimate of the amount you need to bid to show up on the first page. It is not the same for all keywords or, even for the same keyword across accounts. It is calculated based on Quality Score and competition. The required first-page bid is relatively low for keywords with a good Quality Score. However, in competitive and saturated markets, you’ll find high first page bids for keywords with good Quality Scores (7- 10) as well.
The first-page bid is directional. It is the minimum required bid to show on the first page of search results. It doesn’t guarantee a high position.
Why is it important to show on the first page of search results?
Ad space on the first page of search results is prime real estate as most users don’t go beyond the first page when they are looking for something. Keywords showing on the first page of search results always get more traffic.
How to decide which keywords should be above the first-page bid?
This really depends on your budget and how important a keyword is to your business. If you have the budget, you can keep all your keywords above the first-page bid. However, if you have to choose, we recommend segmenting keywords into three sections based on impact and the required bid increase to meet the first page requirements. The easiest way to create these segments is by using tangible data. We recommend increasing bids for the first section of keywords.
Minimum increase, maximum impact: Keywords with a high Quality Score (7 – 10) and current bid just slightly (10 – 20%) below the first-page bid.
Medium increase, high impact: Keywords with a Quality Score between 5 to 6 and current bid 20 – 40% below the first page bid.
Maximum increase least impact: Keywords with a Quality Score lower than 5 and current bid 40%+ below the first-page bid.
How does Optmyzr help?
Our system analyzes performance data for each keyword and gives you a list of keywords that will have the highest impact with a minimum bid increase. You can choose to increase the bid to the first-page bid or, to a % slightly higher than the first-page bid for these keywords. The keywords the system recommends already have a good Quality Score and just need a little push in terms of bids. Increasing bids for these keywords gives them a chance to perform and can help get more traffic and sales. It is sometimes difficult to spot these keywords because they get ‘buried’ in the list of keywords that have bids below the required first-page bid. You can review and implement bid changes with just a click from within the Optmyzr interface.
Is changing bids (max CPC) for keywords the answer to reducing your cost/sale or CPA? The answer is no. Getting sales/conversions through AdWords or any SEM campaign is a three step process and changing bids for your keywords only helps with the first step.
Step 1: The search
A user types in a search query. Google matches the query with a keyword in your AdWords account and triggers your ad. The bid (along with other factors) decides which position your ad will show. The role of your keyword bid ends here.
Step 2: The click
Your ad is showing in the top position. Is your ad text relevant enough to your keyword? Will it compel the user to click on it? An optimized bid may get your ad ranked high but if your ad text is not good the user won’t click on it. One of the best ways to make your ad text relevant is to feature your keyword in it. Also, mention other USPs like free shipping, price points etc.
Step 3: The conversion
You get the click and the user is on your site! But it doesn’t end here. Does your landing page offer what the ad text promised? If your ad text promoted black shoes and the landing page leads to talks about a black dress, the user will probably just close the page. Unfortunately or fortunately, users want instant gratification. The landing page does offer what your ad text promised. How easy is it for a user to buy your product or, convert? How many steps does it take to get to your thank you page? Is your sign-up process too long?
To increase sales/conversions and to reduce CPA (cost/conversion), each of the above steps is important and changing bids only helps in the first step. This is why just changing bids or, using an automated bid management system that only changes bids, is not the solution. Next time someone tells you they can reduce the cost/sale for your SEM campaigns by just changing bids for your keywords, think again.
Google has a tremendous amount of data about how people interact with ads and the computing power and machine learning models to find useful patterns within this.
Combine that with the fact they make bid management available for free to all advertisers and it’s no surprise that their bidding tools are some of the most widely used in the PPC world.
Optmyzr’s tools are the perfect complement for Google’s bid automation, enabling advertisers to monitor and analyze results and to bring their own business data into the mix to further improve results.
For example, Optmyzr can suggest geo bid adjustments while you’re doing smart bidding on Google ads (check out the video below) or use product margin data to enable bidding for profitability, taking things a step further than Google’s target ROAS.
But in working with thousands of advertisers to help take their bid management to the next level, we noticed a fair bit of confusion stemming from the fact that there are 11 types of Google bid strategies that each interact differently with campaign and ad group bid adjustments.
Here’s a fairly common example of why there is confusion: as advertisers transition between bid management strategies, it’s not always obvious which bid adjustments still matter so advertisers with a target ROAS strategy continue to spend time on setting demographic bid adjustments. This is unfortunately a complete waste of time as those bid adjustments are simply ignored by Google.
Advertisers don’t realize they’re wasting time because bid adjustments can be added in the Google Ads interface but depending on the selected bid strategy they may be ignored without warning.
While Optmyzr points out these issues with our Policy and Audit Report, we wanted to help demystify this for all advertisers regardless of whether or not they use Optmyzr so we worked with Google and PPCers on Twitter (shout outs to @BertOnckelinx and @navahf) to create a table of interactions between bid strategies and bid adjustments.
We’ve documented the places in the Google Help Center where our findings came from and tested the settings ourselves. Some of Google’s help materials offer conflicting statements but we’ve done our best to reflect what we see in the real world. Google Ads is constantly evolving so please get in touch with us if you have a suggestion for how to make the table better.
[Click here to see a larger version](https://www.optmyzr.com/forestry/interactions-of-bid-strategies-table.webp) of this image.
Google Help Center References:
1. Unlike bid adjustments for manual CPC, your bid adjustments for Target CPA modify the value of your CPA target, rather than the bids themselves.
2. Because Target ROAS helps optimize your bids based on real-time data, your existing bid adjustments are not used. There is one exception: You can still set mobile bid adjustments of -100%. Note that you don’t need to remove bid adjustments—they just won’t be used.
4. Smart Bidding will use your audiences as signals to bid more efficiently and help get you more conversions and conversion value. Bid adjustments work differently when you’ve applied a conversion-based automated bid strategy and the campaign or ad group contains multiple lists with overlapping users. Rather than adjusting your bids, your bid adjustments will instead prioritize the audience list to which an impression, click, etc. will be attributed.
5. ECPC automatically takes into account different conversion rates for all types of traffic but sets bids separately for mobile devices. This means you don’t need to set any bid adjustments (aside from mobile) for ECPC to maximize conversions. However, if you want to bid more aggressively for certain types of traffic you can still choose to set a bid adjustment. This adjustment will be applied on top of ECPC’s automatic adjustments.
6. Google does not recommend setting bid adjustments unless those adjustments are being made for reasons that wouldn’t be captured in the conversions such as LTV.
7. Starting in late June 2019, advertisers will no longer be able to add new Target Search Page Location or Target Outranking Share bid strategies. Later this year, existing campaigns still using these strategies will automatically be migrated to the Target Impression Share strategy based on previous target locations and historical impression share.
Not all clicks are created equal — some are more likely to convert than others. In the days of manual CPC bidding this meant that PPC specialists had to adjust bids to account for these differences in expected conversion rates. They might have set geo bid adjustments to bid more in Germany and less in Switzerland or to bid higher on mobile devices than on desktops.
But then Smart Bidding (Google’s name for its most advanced version of automated bidding) came along and many bid adjustments stopped working the way advertisers expected. We covered how different bid adjustments interact with different bid strategies in a previous post.
Let’s see how Value Rules, the shiny new toy from Google Ads, works to restore bid adjustments for automated bids and, most importantly, how to use this new tool correctly for optimal results.
You can now adjust conversion values based on characteristics like location, device, and audience to help optimize your campaigns!
Value Rules let you set bid adjustments for Smart Bidding
Value Rules were announced at Google Marketing Live 2019 and finally came out of beta in late summer of 2021. Value Rules let advertisers create rules to adjust conversion values whereas bid adjustments simply adjust CPCs. So how then are Value Rules a replacement for bid adjustments you might ask.
Remember that smart bidding automatically sets the appropriate CPC bid every time a search is done for your ad. This real-time bid is based on the expected value the click may produce and the advertiser’s target return on ad spend (tROAS).
In a simple example, if Google expects the click has a 10% chance of leading to a $100 sale, then that click is worth $10 (0.10 * $100 = $10). Combine that with a tROAS of 200% (i.e. make $2 for every $1 spent on ads), then the CPC bid will be $5 (i.e. this $5 click is expected to create $10 of value).
For this auction:
Click’s value is estimated at $10
tROAS is 200%
Automatically set a bid of $5
If user clicks, advertiser pays up to $5 and is expected to get $10 of value, hence ROAS is 200%
With Value Rules, you could tell Google that the conversion value would be double. By doubling the conversion value in the example above, you will end up setting double the CPC.
For the same auction, now with a Value Rule:
Value Rules says conversion value is double
Click’s value is estimated at $20 instead of $10
tROAS is 200%
Automatically set a bid of $10 instead of $5
If user clicks, advertiser pays up to $10 and is expected to get $20 of value, hence ROAS is 200%
As you can see, a Value Rule that doubles the value reported for a conversion is effectively the same as creating a bid adjustment of 2x.
Don’t use Value Rules the same way as bid adjustments
Now here’s the important thing. While you could use Value Rules as a straight-up replacement for bid adjustments, you should NOT because you’d be doubling up on what Google’s automated bidding is already doing for you.
Remember bid adjustments are way to manipulate bids when you’re doing the bidding process manually so let’s review that manual process for a minute. First, how are CPC bids typically derived? Say you expect 10% of clicks to fill out your lead gen form, and each form fill is worth $100 to your business, then your CPC bid would be $10 (0.10 * $100).
Next, how are bid adjustments decided? You’d look at your conversion numbers in Google Ads and notice that customers in Germany convert at a 20% higher rate, 12% instead of 10% of the time. So you set a +20% bid adjustment for clicks from Germany. Hence your $10 bid becomes a $12 bid when the user is in Germany (0.10 * 120% * $100 = $12).
Now here’s the rub… With smart bidding, Google already knows this difference in expected conversion rate so it will already set a $12 bid. This is true because the data you used to decide a 20% bid adjustment is the exact same data Google already gets from you when you use conversion tracking.
The bottom line is that creating a Value Rule to adjust bids based on expected conversion rates will simply stack bid adjustments and get you to bid incorrectly. So please don’t.
Remember, Google removed Broad Match Modified keywords because 95% of advertisers were using it wrong and getting results that weren’t intended. Let’s not go down that same path.
How to use Value Rules to optimize PPC campaigns
Value Rules are tremendously useful as a form of bid adjustments for smart bidding if you use the right data to create your rules.
A good rule will be based on something you haven’t told Google.
It turns out that there’s a lot advertisers know about their business that they’re not communicating to Google through the conversion tracking pixel, seasonality adjustments or different targets.
Let’s go back to our example with German customers. While we already told Google they convert 20% better than typical, what happens after the conversion? Do they typically have a higher lifetime value? Or do these conversions result in more store visits because you have more stores per capita in Germany than in other places?
We started with ‘not all clicks are created equal’, now we have ‘not all conversions are created equal’. Value Rules give us a way to communicate these differences in conversion quality.
How to use Value Rules
Value Rules are set at the account level. The rules can be based on location (physical or location of interest), device, or audience.
For audience, advertisers can choose between who the user is, what they’re interested in, what they’re actively searching or planning, and how they’ve interacted with your business.
Rules can be based on just one of the three types of segments, or combinations of up to two segments. Once advertisers pick the types for their first rule, all other rules must use the same two segment types. For example, if the first rule combines location and audience type, then all following rules must also use location and audience and it won’t be possible to create rules using device types.
There is a nice preview of rules, and the ‘If x, Then y’ methodology should already be very familiar to Optmyzr users of our very powerful PPC Rule Engine.
The action of a rule is to manipulate the reported conversion value by incrementing it by a set amount or multiplying it by a certain factor.
For example, if a user is located in the US and works in the tech industry, then add 5 to the value that was reported by the conversion pixel. Or, if a user is located in the Netherlands and regardless of audience, then multiply the reported value by 0.8.
The resulting rules will look something like this in Google.
Alternatives to Value Rules
As I’ve explained before, Value Rules are a less precise way to communicate conversion quality to Google than alternatives such as offline conversion tracking or value adjustments. But they are much simpler to use than the alternatives so they’re a great next step for advertisers who previously haven’t optimized their accounts by optimizing how they report conversions.
Value Rules in Optmyzr
Optmyzr will have an innovative new approach to creating Value Rules very soon, so drop our support team a line if you’d like to be one of the first to test it out.
Google Value Rules FAQ: How It Really Works
Updated August 26, 2021
Google’s Value Rules are a great feature for advertisers who want more control over automated bidding but who don’t want to set up the more complex offline conversions or value adjustment systems.
We got several questions related to this feature so here’s a roundup of the most popular ones. We’ll continue to amend this post as new information about Value Rules becomes available.
Do reports show different conversion values when using value rules?
Yes, the ‘conversion value’ column will show adjusted values throughout your entire account for search, shopping, and display campaigns.
This means that if you send reports to your boss or client with conversion values, these values will be ‘incorrect’ after enabling value rules. How you define ‘correct’ is up to you but there will be a change in how values are calculated and this could create issues with reporting.
We recommend having a conversation with your stakeholders before enabling value rules. Alternatively, you can use automated reporting tools like those offered by Optmyzr, to use value rules to improve bidding (using adjusted conversion values).
Are conversion values retroactively updated?
Values start being adjusted from the moment you create your value rules. Previously reported values will not be changed.
How can I see my original conversion values?
To see the unadjusted conversion values, in other words, the conversion value as if you had no value rules, enable the segment “Conversions → Value Rule Adjustment” on the account or campaign overview page.
After doing this, you’ll see a new segment for “original value (no rule applied) for any account or campaign that has a non-zero conversion value.
If a conversion satisfies multiple value rules, which one is used?
Amy Bishop explained this really well in her post about value rules. This is the order in which rules are applied:
For locations, the rule for the most granular location is used i.e. the rule for San Francisco takes precedence over the rule for California.
For audiences, Google will try rules in the following order:
Customer Match
Remarketing & Similar Audiences
Affinity & In-Market Audiences
Detailed Demographics
If there is a tie in an audience segment, Google will choose a rule using the “multiply” logic over the “add” rule.
If any other tie remains, they will choose the rule with the highest adjustment.
Is there really a 1:1 relationship between a bid adjustment and a value rule?
Nice article Fred, thanks. I'm wondering though, is the conversion modifier and bid modifier confirmed by Google to be a 1:1 relationship? I'm a bit doubtful about that. -->"By doubling the conversion value in the example above, you will end up setting double the CPC."
This is a great question from Mike Ryan who really knows the details of PPC. And he’s right that setting a value rule is not necessarily the exact equivalent of setting a bid adjustment.
Here’s why: Value rules change the value of a conversion that is reported to Google. Google’s machine learning algorithms then use these self-reported conversion values to predict the probable value of future conversions.
But remember Google considers over 500,000 signals from each auction to make this prediction.
And while the advertiser may have adjusted the value they reported because they really like conversions from California, the ML system may instead find other factors (like time of day) that correlate with these high conversion values. Rather than bid higher because the user is in California, it bids higher because the user is searching at night.
Value rules are set at the account level and change the values for all reported conversion values for search, shopping and display campaigns. The rules will change the values regardless of the bid management style of the campaign.
If a campaign is using tROAS, maximize conversion value or is a smart shopping campaign, then the adjusted conversion values will impact how Google determines bids. They will continue to consider only those conversion actions included in conversions (this is a setting for each conversion action).
What is the range of allowed adjustments?
A rule can change the original value of a conversion by a factor ranging from 0.5x to 10x. Alternatively, advertisers can choose to add a static value to a conversion that meets the conditions of the rule.
A couple of weeks ago, Google’s developer blog carried a hidden announcement: Google Ads is going to retire their Target CPA (tCPA) and Target ROAS (tROAS) Smart Bidding strategies.
Starting in April 2021, these functionalities will be merged with other existing bid strategies.
For most advertisers, the only difference will be to switch to a bidding strategy with a different name with no impact on performance. But to be safe, you should review your account setup and monitor it for irregularities during this shift.
What is Google changing?
Starting from April 2021, advertisers will not be able to create outright tROAS or tCPA bid strategies. Instead, there will be two new fields: one to add a target CPA for the ‘Maximize Conversions’ strategy, and another for target ROAS for the ‘Maximize Conversion Value’ strategy.
That means tCPA and tROAS strategies will get fully absorbed by these new avatars.
Here’s what Google shopping specialist Kirk Williams has to say about this change:
What it means for advertisers
If you use Smart Bidding, you’ll have to start using a different setting to achieve your CPA and ROAS goals. Since advertisers who use Target ROAS for Smart Shopping campaigns are effectively already using a Maximize Conversion Value strategy with a tROAS, the search version will naturally start to look a bit like this.
This table shows the new settings that will be equivalent to the ones you may be using today:
One more thing. We know that the ads auction uses cost-per-click pricing, even with tCPA or tROAS. While Google’s automated bidding helps advertisers buy more of the clicks that have a predicted conversion rate or conversion value, combined with the CPC, it will help advertisers meet their targets for CPA or ROAS.
Creating budget constraints
How bidding strategies work depends on their constraints. So what can you do when both Target CPA/ROAS and your budget act as constraints?
In the past, Google recommended that advertisers with the old tCPA strategy and a constrained budget either remove the budget constraint (by increasing the budget), or switch to the old Maximize Conversions strategy. This obviously won’t work when tCPA and Maximize Conversions are merged and become the same.
Which means that after the transition, advertisers using Maximize Conversions with a tCPA setting and a constrained budget should either raise their budget or remove the CPA setting.
Why Maximize Conversions should not have a target CPA and a limited budget
PPC pro Martin Röttgerding has an interesting perspective on what might happen if advertisers run their bid strategy with two constraints:
A Maximize Conversions strategy is pretty set on buying as many conversions as possible. When you remove budget constraint, this goal will then turn to buying every single conversion, which is risky as you won’t have any guards against exceedingly high incremental costs per conversion.
If there is a limited budget for this strategy, then it will only keep buying the next cheapest conversion until the budget is spent. Introducing a target CPA constraint on the top will only set conflicting goals as the system could either buy more conversions for lower prices or fewer conversions closer to your target CPA.
When you introduce conflicting goals, you lose control over the system. It might decide to prioritize one goal today and the other tomorrow. And when your results aren’t what you expected, it’s hard to track down the reason as the system doesn’t tell you what it tried to do.
If you’re going to use Maximize Conversions with tCPA setting for a budget-constrained campaign, at the very least you need to monitor the quality of conversions after the switch.
Review your conversions
When a conversion is cheap, it means that not many advertisers value that conversion enough and so there’s little competition for it. And in turn, Google marks that low-value conversion and makes it available at a lower price. So when you use Maximize Conversions with no tCPA setting, you may be buying some of the conversions that are of less value to others.
The only way out of this? Help Google understand what you truly value in a conversion. Use the offline conversion import (OCI) to tell Google which conversions were more or less valuable to you. This will help their machines target more of the good kind of conversions.
What to do if you use Optmyzr
With the sunset of tCPA and tROAS bid strategies, we don’t expect to see much change in terms of how bids are managed. However, there are a few things we recommend Optmyzr users do to get ahead of things.
As a precaution, set up automated alerts to monitor performance anomalies. Use the budget optimization tools in Optmyzr to make sure that budget settings aren’t suffocating profitable campaigns.
As we wait for Google’s official response, we’ll keep updating our prebuilt strategies in the Rule Engine to help Optmyzr users manage this transition more easily.
Advertisers with existing rules using older strategies will need to start revising their setup. If you aren’t sure what to do, contact our support team or your account manager for assistance. We’ll also reach out to any users who’ll be impacted by these changes to let you know what to do as we get closer to the window when Google plans to remove these strategies entirely.
When we think about bid management of our keywords and product groups, there are key areas that every marketer concentrates on. For example, targeting the right ROAS/CPA, ensuring that impression share is not lost, not losing the top spots to your competitors, giving lower bids to expensive or non-converting keywords, and so on.
While it’s right to focus on optimizations for setting the bids correctly, marketers should not forget other areas that need their attention as well.
Here are some areas where marketers shouldn’t be limiting themselves to bid management to tackle common problems:
• My conversions are best in the middle of the day. So, I want to increase my bids during that time and put them back to normal for the rest of the day.
• On some days, costs for clicks are much higher than expected from some locations. Can we monitor Avg. CPC each hour for some locations and reduce bids when these clicks become expensive?
• I’m overspending my budget for the day, so I would like to reduce my bids during the second half of the day.
• My bids are on the higher side, which exhausts my budget by the middle of the day and I end up overspending each day every month. And, if I reduce my bids, my clicks and conversions drop.
It’s important to know the right thing to do for each of the above use-cases. Let’s wrap these pain points with the right solutions.
1. Spread out your budget throughout the day.
Keep your bids as it is and implement hourly bid adjustments. Analyze historical data and find the times in the day which spend more and which perform better as well. So, you need to apply bid adjustments for different times of the day based on your goal.
One way to get started would be to look at the times of the day when your conversion rate is high and check the impression share during those specific times. If you have a low impression share, it means that you aren’t able to drive as much traffic as you could for high-performing hours.
To fix this, increase the bid adjustments to grab more traffic. At the same time, for the time slots which don’t convert – apply negative bid adjustments or disable those time slots to not serve ads at all. This is like load-shedding – wipe out budgets during some time slots of the day and keeping it for the times of the day when you expect better performance.
2. Don’t overspend your daily budget.
Use a budget tracker – to have a way to not exceed a given budget amount each day even if Google allows spending 200% of your daily budget. You can use solutions like Flexible Budget script at Optmyzr. The script runs automatically every hour to check the cost you’ve spent until the hour of the day and pause the account/campaign when the target budget is spent. Learn more.
3. Analyze the lost impression share.
Before dropping the ball, it is very important to identify if it was the budget or ad rank (bid) that limited the performance of your account/campaign. Sometime back, a Digital Marketer shared with me that they’ve been increasing bids for high performing keywords to improve their impression share to 85% from current ~60% Impression share – but with no success.
On analyzing their account’s performance with PPC Investigator, we found that increasing the bids didn’t help because they were losing impressions due to budget constraints and not the bid. Learning from this? While you increase the bids – don’t forget to check if you’re losing impression share because of insufficient budget allotment.
4. Go granular – manage bids for each keyword.
Don’t limit yourself to set bids only at the ad group or campaign level. While you find high-performing keywords that perform better, it’s equally important to find keywords that are bleeding money.
If you can identify the underperforming keywords and reduce bids on them, it will allow you to provide more budget towards better-performing keywords which will last for a longer period of the day and get you better results at the same time.
Conclusion
What advertisers forget is that each time that a new bid is set, Google takes time to test it and bring you results based on the changes. So, if you change the bids too frequently, you might very well be hampering the learning cycle and eventually the results.
The solution? You need to give your bids room to breathe and check out the other factors which you need to be concerned about apart from just setting your bids again and again.
It’s true: the right bidding strategy can decide the fate of your PPC accounts.
With the ever-changing dynamics of search marketing, marketers need to be extra careful navigating the tough waters of bid management. Moreover, they also need to be conscious of Google’s take on limiting search query reports and pushing new limits on data access.
In order to gain big on leads, we have to do more than just focusing on bidding strategies. Metrics like quality score, tCPA, ROAS, etc., can also play a big role in influencing bid management.
So this week on episode 23 of PPC Town Hall, we discussed tips and tactics by specialists to improve your bid management for good lead generation and e-commerce.
Our panelists for the week:
Navah Hopkins, Director of Paid Media, Hennessey Digital
Frederick Vallaeys, Co-Founder, Optmyzr
Geetanjali Tyagi, Co-Founder, Optmyzr
As always, you can view this week’s episode as well as previous editions of PPC Town Hall right here.
Here are 5 tips that experts swear by to manage bids for leads and e-commerce.
1. The changing face of Search Terms Reports
Navah: Initially, when it was announced that the Search Terms Reports were being depreciated, I didn’t think much of it. Ultimately, you’re still gonna be able to see the click data, the keyword data, and your ROASes. It’s not that you’re getting fewer clicks, you’re just not getting that transparency on the queries.
But now, I think it is an actual problem as I have noticed an under-spending issue. Not being able to see where the budget is being funneled is really a problem. My theory is that a lot of the spend is being directed to local service ads rather than paid search. Local service ads come at a dramatic discount, without any pre-requirement of running a paid search ad.
Apart from this, there is no transparency for different automation strategies that are either underperforming or overperforming.
2. SKAGs vs STAGs
Navah: Lately, I’ve been pushing far more broad match ad groups and campaigns, especially with how much the match types have changed. The allocation of budget to broad match and exact match keywords seems much higher than phrase match keywords. Now, I’m finding one broad match skag, 3-4 exact match keywords, and then maybe one mod broad serves better than focusing on only exact/phrase.
The choice to use a match type or a keyword is entirely dependent on what I’ll see coming back in search terms. Did they match by the rules of exact? Or did exact close variants matched by the rules of broad, etc.,? The fact that we no longer have that visibility truly, is a bit of a problem.
In terms of delivery in account performance, I still see that STAGs (grouping of keywords) seems to perform better than SKAGs. In terms of match type, I’m very much pulling away from phrase match as they tend to get caught quite more in the delivery problem.
Fred: Match types don’t mean what they used to be earlier. With the loosening of the match types, most people can not figure out what a phrase match can achieve that another match type wouldn’t. For people, who haven’t been doing PPC quite that long, a phrase match meant that the words between the quotes were supposed to stay together. But that doesn’t actually work anymore.
Geetanjali: With the whole match types changing and close variants coming in, people who swear by SKAGs have still not completely let go. With the search terms changes, the whole alpha-beta structure of mining keywords using your broad match and then moving them to exact might not work that well. You probably don’t know all the search queries that are coming in with your broad match keywords, whether it’s SKAG or otherwise.
3. Let’s talk bidding
Navah: Bidding is one of those tactics that you should just delegate out. There isn’t a good reason to do truly manual bidding. Manual bidding can be helpful when you don’t trust native automation to bid enough for your important terms, however, there is no good reason to sit there adjusting bids all day. Use scripts/rules, or you can use an amazing tool like Optmyzr.
Geetanjali: If you are using smart bidding, it’s really important to send the right data into the system. I also think that having the right level of attribution is needed as well. I have come across customers who are completely using Google’s automated bidding strategies and running on last-click attribution. So, the system is automatically cutting the queries that would rise on top of the funnel, conversions and these customers keep wondering why it’s not working.
Also, if you’re delegating your bidding, you need to know which parts you’d be choosing. If you still have to set the right targets, you still have to have the attribution model, then that’s the part that you can’t delegate to Google. If you don’t give the system the right data, the systems, which are after all machines, can’t make the right decision.
4. The problem with AI and Maximize Conversions
Navah: Two things play here. One, in your Conversion settings, you can tell Google whether to count in your conversions or not. This means you can still track actions you’re interested in without having them derail your automated/smart bidding strategies. The other thing is don’t use smart bidding if you don’t trust your conversions. Just don’t.
You actually need to have an infrastructure in place that can track the lead through. Have an open conversation with your client about their intake. Part of it comes down to helping your client and helping them build infrastructure to report and have an internal intake system. The other part is doing the legwork yourself, having call tracking metrics, checking lead quality, etc.
5. Quality of leads
Navah: We need to understand the quality of leads in accepted leads against rejected leads and why they get rejected. One thing that we found in new advertisers is that a penchant for leaving search partners on and getting conversions. But then those conversions turn out really terrible.
We make sure that every quarter that there is this buy-in and we ask some core questions. How many leads are you getting per month? Where could that number grow to? How much do you make per service vertical? Are there any upcoming changes in this quarter that we need to be aware of?
Conclusion
I’ve noticed that as newer PPC managers come in who have never done manual bid management, they lack the understanding of how to manage bids or how the auctions work.
For some reason, people tend to believe that putting in a bid or a target for tCPA or tROAS is enough to walk away. That’s certainly not okay. Google is automating the conversions between expected conversion when you’re trying to achieve in terms of CPA and putting the bids in the auction.
But remember this: it doesn’t look at anything to do with your business! It doesn’t necessarily know all the things about your business as you do. At the end of the day, your priority in the type of leads you want should be reflected in your targets.
Keep in mind that nothing is fixed as we know them to be. Keep testing and discussing ways to make the most of your accounts.
Seasoned PPC professionals turn to efficient bid management tools, like Optmyzr, to keep their accounts top-notch and drive good leads. Try and experience our capabilities yourself by signing up for our 14-day free trial. Full access to all our features, credit card free!
Imagine if your bank let you transfer money to people but made it difficult to decide who receives your transfers. Pretty silly, right?
Despite the objections of every advertiser ever, it’s still not easy to tune many aspects of your campaigns in Google Ads. So it was pretty much second nature that we stepped up to make the experience better for our customers.
Bid adjustments — using audience analytics and insights to regulate ad performance — are invaluable. But you can’t overlook the time-consuming chore that is bid management through Google’s engine. The challenge is even greater when it comes to setting placements, especially the ever-popular ‘exclude all mobile apps’ preference.
Those are the two key areas of our recent Rule Engine updates designed to help account managers and PPC strategists speed things up. Let’s take a look at what’s new, where to find the updates, and how you can use them.
New in Geo Bid Adjustment and Placements
Simply put, these updates take the form of instant strategies in the Rule Engine, Optmyzr’s logic-driven rule builder that uses ‘if-then’ statements to get your account to take a specific action when certain conditions are met.
These new strategies are:
Find Expensive Cities: Reduce bid adjustments for cities that have a higher CPA than the campaign average, or that have no conversions despite having more clicks than are typically required for at least 1 conversion.
Find New Cities: Find out which cities are starting to direct traffic to your campaigns in the last 14 days (compared to the previous period).
Target Cost per Click: Set geo bid adjustments based on the target CPC you wish to achieve. Available at the country, region, and city levels.
Target Cost per Conversion: Set geo bid adjustments based on the target CPA you wish to achieve. Available at the country, region, and city levels.
Exclude Mobile Apps With Zero Conversions: Find all mobile apps with no conversions and exclude them as placements in bulk.
While our instant strategies come with recommended settings, they can be further customized and automated using your own preferences. If you’re familiar with how the Rule Engine works, you can create your own geo bid adjustment and placement strategies from scratch — all the components are there.
Other Geo Bid Adjustment and Placement features
The Geo Bid Adjustments tool analyzes campaign performance in different locations and makes recommendations for bid adjustments. You can implement adjustments at the country, region, city, and zip/pin code level. This tool also lets you discover new cities based on traffic and target them according to ROAS or CPA.
With Placements Exclusion, you can customize your strategy to prevent showcasing your ads at random in the Google Display Network. No more manually excluding apps one by one. Bypass the limits of Google Ads and remove your ads from showing via the entire mobile apps category.
Optmyzr Tip:Stop wasting money on bids and sites that don’t yield profit or returns. These tools give you more granular control over campaign behavior based on geolocations and ad placement. You can use a mix of custom and instant strategies in the Rule Engine to improve your ad performance or use these tools for research before you even build and run a campaign.
Use cases for Geo Bid Adjustments
1. Account for holidays or other closures
Depending on your industry and location, some events lead to virtually zero-sale days with customers focused on things other than shopping. With Geo Bid Adjustments, you can now mark those locations and lower your bid to account for those lulls in activity. Customize the bids to -90% to keep the campaign running but with reduced ad spend.
2. Track cities with wasted ad spend
Throughout your campaign, you might find some locations don’t provide enough conversions for the number of clicks they show for. These might be areas where the cost per conversion is higher than the campaign average, resulting in potentially wasted spend. Now you can just use the ‘Find Expensive Cities’ instant strategy in Rule Engine, and customize your initial campaign actions to exclude these cities or create bid adjustments for those locations. Or, you can use the strategy as an alert system to be notified of locations that put out a higher CPA.
3. Discover potential target locations
Due to erratic lockdowns and reopenings across the globe, businesses might start receiving traffic from newer locations where they didn’t drive sales in the past. You need a system to account for any possible new traffic. With the ‘Find New Cities’ strategy, you can find locations that showed traffic in the last 14 days but not before. Run this strategy twice a month to track any new traffic and find new areas of interest.
Use Cases for Display Placements
1. Target placements with a specific bid
While running a Display campaign without any targeted placements, you’ll see that the engine will automatically place you where it thinks your ad may perform best based on past data. With the Display Placements Exclusion tool, you can identify sites (or placements) where you’re doing well and customize your strategies to target these in future campaigns.
2. Bid lower for placements with bad ROAS or CPA
Most ad placements on mobile devices happen below the fold, and the chances that people scroll down to even see to your ads are extremely thin. Your placements might not have enough viewability and will therefore have poor ROAS or CPA. With this same tool, you can see suggestions for such weak placements and lower your bid on them to prevent spending on low-converting traffic.
3. Exclude placements on all apps or a specific operating system
While some apps are great to advertise on, others tend to have an audience who won’t benefit from your ad at all. With the Placements Exclusion instant strategy, you can stop your ads from showing on all mobile apps and even certain operating systems.
Conclusion
Between our new Rule Engine strategies and existing tools, Optmyzr allows you to truly control and optimize your campaigns beyond what Google’s automated rules will enable. This makes search marketers the final authority and allows you to layer multiple powerful automations to support your campaigns efficiently.
Analyze data based on preferred date ranges and other metrics to arrive at what’s best for your business, and focus your time on building excellent strategies rather than performing repetitive tasks.
Save time, save ad spend, and take control back from Google.
During my 5 years as a PPC strategist, I’ve learned that the most common dilemma marketers face is choosing between automated and manual bidding.
While many other factors also come into the picture — budgets and targets, for example — choosing an efficient bidding strategy is the undisputed winner.
So let’s dive right into how we find the solution. Here are 4 proven tips I’ve seen PPC managers use to control automated bidding.
While Smart Bidding looks more agile, it may not be as robust as you’d like it to be. This is because the automated system may not wait long enough to adjust bids. Those bids might be set based on new patterns, leading to potential anomalies.
So do you rely on Google’s Smart Bidding to get the best results? Or should you roll up your sleeves and take responsibility for manually driving the best results?
In my experience, the answer is a combination of the two.
Experts say that your choice of bidding strategy should depend on how much time you can devote to PPC management and your goals.
But according to a more recent train of thought from our CEO Fred Vallaeys, marketers should train automated bidding strategies to get better results — something likely to resonate with the world’s most renowned PPC practitioners.
As you rely on automated bidding strategies to stay agile (especially in the current scenario), add your own expertise and understanding of the market to strengthen Google’s automation.
The solution: Pick the right automated bidding strategy and train it to get your desired results efficiently. That means feeding it the right settings, like Target CPA and Target ROAS, at a very granular level.
1. Don’t be afraid to switch strategies to get more control
Here’s my golden tip: Don’t set it and forget it.
Automation is only as good as what you feed it. You may start a campaign to achieve one thing, but don’t leave it there. Monitor its performance regularly, and when you don’t see the desired output, you can easily switch to the next strategy.
For example, when you want to generate conversions rather than get clicks, you’d choose the “Maximize Conversions” bidding strategy. After running that for 30 days or exhausting your budget, you can gauge the performance of your campaigns.
When you have a tool like Optmyzr, the next step is to check out performance using the Rule Engine strategy shown below. And if you’ve had enough conversions — say 50 in 30 days — you can switch to a more specific strategy like “Target CPA” or “Target ROAS”.
This is because the campaign is already able to spend more than its daily budget. In that scenario, taking control of the target values for CPA or ROAS can improve performance even further.
2. Get granular
Align campaigns based on the goals and strategies you intend to use for optimization, right from the beginning. Think of it as a more futuristic approach to preparing your campaigns for a bidding strategy like “Target CPA” or “Target ROAS” from the beginning.
If you have different margins for the brand, categories of products, product types, or location targets you’re advertising for, then group them separately.
3. Update your targets
Google allows you to set the target values for “Target CPA” and “Target ROAS” bidding strategies. Make use of this flexibility.
If you set one bidding target for all of your ad groups, it’s akin to expecting all the fingers on your hand to do the same thing.
One target for all your ad groups is likely to limit their performance, and you may also prevent Google’s machine from optimizing the best results for your different ad groups. Instead, optimize your target values based on each ad group’s current performance.
While automated bidding strategies may work for most of your campaigns, it might not be the solution in every scenario. Keep your options open.
Using Optmyzr, you can set up automation to find campaigns where automated bidding didn’t fare well. Switch them to a control group of campaigns where you can run manual bidding strategies.
Check out the image below showing how to find those campaigns using our Rule Engine:
Conclusion
Automated bidding strategies are a good foundation, but it’s the PPC strategist’s role to make them smarter. Analyze, introspect, and always be prepared to shift bidding strategies if you aren’t moving the needle on your goals.
And as you switch to other bidding strategies, keep in mind that the accumulation of data points over a period of time can guide Google’s engine to drive the best results for you.
Optimizing your strategies on automated bidding isn’t always simple, but Optmyzr can help you shave hours off execution. Our tools layer automation over what the ad engines provide, helping you leverage automated bidding while staying in control.
When it comes to my clients, I have noticed a clear distinction between the winners and losers of e-commerce during this crisis.
The changes in the consumer landscape, as a result of the Coronavirus, are affecting different industries in seemingly polar opposite ways. The current state of commerce can be either a major advantage or disadvantage for performance, depending on industry and business model.
While e-tailers are quickly adjusting strategies to deal with the current environment, the major players in the advertising space are also changing the rules. Both Amazon and Google have made strategic changes to their advertising models, changing the game for everyone.
The majority of businesses I support are in the retail industry, split among e-commerce retailers, manufacturers and lifestyle brands. I have noticed a major divergence across these categories in terms of direct-to-consumer PPC performance.
The customers I would classify in the manufacturing and lifestyle brand category have struggled with reduced search volumes and lower conversion rates. These brands often have a strong DTC presence, but direct-to-consumer isn’t their primary channel of distribution.
The biggest challenge that these brands face is that they do not have the breadth of incoming search traffic the pure-play retailer group enjoys. A large portion of their incoming traffic is tied to high-intent brand queries, and many categories have seen these types of queries drop dramatically when brand and related search phrases are not as well aligned with the stay-at-home lifestyle.
In order to make up for the short-term headwinds, these brands have had to increase short-term promotional activity as well as shift more advertising dollars from a bottom-of-funnel strategy to a full-funnel or mid-funnel strategy, which traditionally require that they accept a lower direct ROI on ad spend.
The good news is that in most cases, the traffic for these branded queries bottomed out in mid-March or early April and have shown consistent growth over the past several weeks. There is some reason to believe that some of the changes in search behavior will return to normal over the next several months.
On the other side of the ‘consumer behavior coin’ are e-commerce retailers I would classify as pure-play in the DIY, Hobby, Home Improvement and Gardening categories. The retailers I support in these categories have benefited from what has been called an “8-week-long Cyber Monday event”.
Transactions and revenue have rocketed to all-time highs, with a steady drumbeat of daily traffic up an average of 100% or more. This jump in traffic hasn’t all been roses, of course, as supply chain capacity has been drastically impacted by stay-at-home orders across the country and internationally.
Increased demand, combined with a less-than-fully-functioning supply chain has impacted stock rates and delivery times, putting a strain on e-tailers.
While the lift in transactions, clicks and revenue can be compared similarly to an extended Cyber Monday event, the change in average CPC is nothing like what we traditionally see during high-demand times.
During holidays, we typically see an increase in average CPC across the board, as the PPC landscape becomes more competitive. Currently, however, the pure-play e-commerce companies I support have seen a drastic drop in CPC.
During the most recent two weeks, these e-commerce companies have seen a drop in average CPC of 37%, with a median drop of 47%. This drop in average CPC, coupled with increased clicks and conversion, has increased ROI by as much as 300% for these companies.
Tip from Wes: If you haven’t yet, I suggest you start testing aggressive CPC changes immediately. If you are concerned about decreasing your site traffic, I suggest using theOptmyzr Rule Engineand set a rule that looks at clicks for rolling seven-day periods. If the clicks for the campaigns you are testing fall below a threshold, you can set your rule to update the bids accordingly.
The drop in CPC has of course been a managed adjustment but has not experienced the expected negative impact on clicks. In fact, the CPC to Click correlation is drastically less elastic than we have seen traditionally. I strongly suspect this is primarily due to a reduction in spending by competitors, with a change in Amazon’s advertising behavior having the most impact across the landscape for these companies.
This suspicion is supported by the data available in the Google Ads Auction Insight tool.
Whereas Amazon typically enjoys between 30-60% impression share in these industries, over the past two months Amazon has dropped off the board completely. This makes sense, as Amazon has also seen both increased order volume and distribution constraints, requiring them to focus on ‘essential services’. It makes complete sense that they would cut ad spending right now.
How long this ‘new normal’ will last is anyone’s guess, but recent changes to the Google Shopping platform suggest that Google is taking the change seriously. The drop in PPC advertisers combined with the increased search volume Amazon is enjoying has pushed Google to institute a more aggressive approach to fill its search listings.
Google recently announced that it would be opening up its shopping platform results, making the results presented on the Google Shopping tab free. While many of the high-volume placements (such as product carousels) will still be paid placements, Google will now be allowing anyone with a qualifying merchant center account to list products.
It will be very interesting to see how the next few months play out.
Will the traffic recovery for these consumer brands continue?
Will Amazon continue its apparent no-advertising policy in these ‘non-essential’ categories?
How will e-tailers, both pure-play as well as DTC channels for consumer brands, be impacted by the recent Google Shopping changes?
There are a lot of questions yet to be answered, but if we know anything for sure, it is that things are unlikely to go back to ‘normal’ anytime soon.
This article is a guest post by a representative from one of Optmyzr’s customers. The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of Optmyzr and its employees.
“Stacked bidding” or “Tiered Bidding” is a strategy in which the same keyword is added in multiple match types to better control costs. The closer a query is to a keyword, the higher the chance that it could lead to a conversion, hence the more an advertiser is willing to spend.
Looks simple… what’s the catch?
For this strategy to work, you need to keep the bids for each match type somewhat surrounding the same amount. For example, and as Frederick Vallaeys explained on this article from Search Engine Land, “if the exact match keyword’s max CPC is $1.00, the advertiser may want to bid 80 percent (or $0.80) for phrase match and 60 percent (or $0.60) for broad or modified broad match”.
The problems with tiered bidding usually result from when the bid is modified for one keyword, but not for its match type counterparts. This results in a confusing and very problematic issue, as the tiered bidding is no longer in place and you might end up with bids that you aren’t controlling, or which slip off your radar.
How to successfully manage tiered bids
At Optmyzr we’ve come up with a solution that puts together a custom recipe from our Rule Engine, its very own spreadsheet capability, an enhanced script, and automation, to create a hassle-free workflow for tiered bid management.
To get started, you’ll first need to use our Stacked Bids enhanced script, to define the ratio which you’d like to maintain between the different bids for the keywords in multiple match types. With this script, a spreadsheet will be generated with a list of keywords existing in multiple match types. By running this script regularly, you can find keywords in multiple match types with their current and expected bids.
After you’ve set this up, you can pull the same spreadsheet into the Rule Engine and create rules as shown below. These rules will let you set the bids for Phrase match and Broad match keywords to 80% and 60% of the Exact Match CPC respectively.
The output of this recipe will give you a list of suggestions of keywords added in multiple match types and the calculated new bids for them to maintain tiered bidding.
For example, you can find any Phrase match keyword which has its current bids higher than their Exact match type counterparts and set their bids to say 60% of the Exact Match keywords Max CPC (this will be automatically pulled in the spreadsheet).
With the Rule Engine’s automation capability, you can set this recipe to be run on a weekly basis and make sure your tiered bids are all set in place!
This custom solution was made using Optmyzr’s Rule Engine and Enhanced Scripts. If you need us to put this recipe in your account, please write to support@optmyzr.com and we’ll be more than happy to do so!
When it comes to Google Shopping Campaigns, there are different ways you can approach the bid management process.
At Optmyzr, we offer three tools that will help you manage shopping bids successfully. They have different focuses and vary by the granularity you’ll need. Whether you’re looking to manage more generic and standard changes in bids or to do so differently for that one specific product attribute, we’ve got you covered.
1. Shopping Bidder
One of these tools is the Shopping Bidder. With the Shopping Bidder, you can make rather standard and bulk modifications for bids based on performance. These bid changes can only be applied to product groups, and work by increasing or decreasing the current bid by a number or percentage.
You can also choose to set a new fixed bid. This tool is most useful for when you want to make changes like, for example, reduce the bids on all non-converting product groups by an X percentage, or set all new product groups at a specific initial bid.
2. Shopping Attribute Bidder
Based on how granular you want to go, at Optmyzr we also have the Shopping Bid by Attributes* tool, where you can combine performance data from your Google Ads account with the attributes in your merchant feed.
This means you can use a division such as Category 0 > Product Type 0 > Brand > Price to make different bid changes for every unique combination of the selected attributes. You can do this so long as you’re maintaining a GrIP structure, i.e. one product SKU per product group. (Try our Utility tool to Create a Grip structure)
3. Rule Engine
Another great tool to manage bids, and perhaps the most versatile one we have so far, is the Rule Engine*. The Rule Engine lets you change bids for product groups based on performance, and gives you a lot more flexibility in terms of comparing performance and setting bids.
The Rule Engine works with recipes that contain a set of rules you’ll define. These rules contain multiple conditions and associated actions, and all of the conditions must be met for the actions to be applied. For example, you can use our target ROAS, conversion rate, etc. to set bids for product groups.
The Rule Engine can even connect with your business data so you can start managing bids by margins or even by weather.
These three tools offer different, yet equally helpful ways of approaching shopping bid management, with different levels of complexity.
*The Bid by Attributes and Rule Engine tools are only available for Pro plan users, but as you can see both give a greater range of possibilities. If you’d like to try them, you can contact us at support@optmyzr.com.
We hosted a webinar to show how the Rule Engine can be used to automate bid management based on external data like sales tracked in a CRM, weather conditions, and conversion types.
You can watch the replay of that webinar here:
Map AdWords entities to external data
A key requirement for using external data is that we must be able to map it to an AdWords entity like a campaign, ad group, keyword, or product group. We do this by looking at the ID and name fields of every row in the spreadsheet.
For example, to be able to use campaign-level weather data, the spreadsheet must contain either the campaign name or the campaign ID on the row that has the weather data like temperature and cloud levels.
Resources to get started
To help you get started with the examples shown in the webinar, here are a few resources that help with the creation of the external data:
The Hour of the Week tool is an incredibly helpful way of visualizing the times and days of the week where your AdWords campaigns perform better. You can manage your bids based on which time slots have the best performance, and avoid wasting budget unnecessarily on those hours of the day when the return on investment is low.
After all, information is the key to success, right?
But wouldn’t it be great if you could not only see the information displayed, but also get recommendations based on your AdWords performance, and make a greatly useful task even easier? Well, luckily, we’re all about smooth efficiency! And that’s where the New Hour of the Week Biddercomes into place.
Our latest update to the Hour of the Week Bid Adjustment includes time-based bid adjustments based on your AdWords KPIs. The tool uses intelligence to tailor bid adjustment suggestions based on your goals. The recommendations are based on historical performance and estimated potential.
With the New Hour of the Week Bidder, you can:
Choose a goal that works for your business. Whether its increasing conversions, reducing cost per conversions or increasing traffic, we’ve got you covered!
Get bid adjustment recommendations based on historical analysis and expected performance, as well as seeing estimated change in traffic and conversions.
Performance and opportunity analysis for individual day parts, which will also allow you to edit day parts.
A small step for your bids, a giant leap for your budget!
I’m the engineer behind our recently announced Shopping Attribute Bidder and I would like to show you some of the benefits you can achieve by deploying a more granular structure for your product groups in shopping campaigns.
How bids work for Shopping Ads
In shopping campaigns, you set bids for product groups. However, not all product groups can get a bid. Why is that? It’s because product groups can be subdivided and the bid can only be set at the final level of subdivision.
Here’s an example where products have been segmented (subdivided) along a few dimensions: first by the category (‘electronics’ or ‘toys’). Electronics are subdivided further by ‘brand’, and toys are not subdivided further. The right column in green represents all other product categories and is called “Everything else” in AdWords. This is further subdivided by ‘used status’.
This segmentation can be shown as a tree:
What’s important here is that in the AdWords interface, each division is called a ‘product group’ but only the ones at the lowest level (the colored ones in the image above) can have a bid. We’ll call these ‘biddable product groups’.
Why AdWords has non-biddable product groups
So why does AdWords even have non-biddable product groups? It’s because the way they let advertisers do the subdivisions in the interface requires one subdivision at a time. In creating the tree, each level has to be subdivided individually.
Doing this is actually really really painful if you just want to build a logical division, for example, splitting all products by category 0, and then splitting all those by brand. AdWords supports 7 levels of subdivision but in the interface anything more than 2 levels is extremely manual.
If you need help with that, check out our super fast Shopping Campaign Builder tool. We’ve had advertisers create hundreds of ad groups and thousands of granular product groups in just minutes with it.
How to set unique bids per product (SKU) in Shopping Ads
How granularly you can set bids depends on how granular your biddable product groups are. So if you want very granular, SKU level bids, you must place each SKU in its own product group.
It’s a similar concept to SKAGs in search campaigns. SKAG stands for Single Keyword Ad Group. The name I came up with for the equivalent of a SKAG in shopping campaigns is the GRIP structure. GRIP stands for GRoup of Individual Products.
Let me show you two ways to split four SKUs (item IDs) into biddable product groups.
Here’s what your biddable product groups contain in a GRIP structure:
In the GRIP structure above, each individual shoe is placed in a product group. The same four products in a non-GRIP structure below are all grouped together based on a subdivision of something they have in common, in this case the fact they’re all sneakers.
In the GRIP structure, I can set a unique bid for each item I sell. In a non-GRIP structure, the bid for all four sneakers has to be the same.
Why the GRIP structure is good for bidding
With the Shopping Attribute Bidder tool I created, we can analyze AdWords performance for any attribute we have included in our Google Merchant Feed. For example, we could analyze how shoes of different sizes perform. Here’s what we might see in Optmyzr:
As you can see, size 11.5 shoes have an ROAS of 1361%. Size 10 shoes on the other hand haven’t sold anything so their ROAS is 0%.
In a non-GRIP structure, this useful insight cannot be acted on because shoes of different sizes exist in the same biddable product group.
In a GRIP structure, on the other hand, we can act on this insight:
What’s really cool is that your structure no longer limits your ability to act on insights. If you want to analyze performance by brand or color, that would work just as easily. Here we use the GRIP structure to change bids for things that are red:
And here we change bids for products from a certain brand:
Not only can you now analyze data using attributes not available in AdWords (we do this by merging your merchant feed with the AdWords reports in our systems), you can even combine attributes to find more granular insights.
Changing bids for GRIP ads
It was important for us to give you the ability to act on insights right from the page where you got the insight. Here’s what the Shopping Attribute Bidder tool looks like when you’ve found an insight that you want to use for a bid change:
The analysis here looks at price ranges of products, something the advertiser has entered using a custom attribute. We can see performance data for each attribute. When products with the same attribute have different bids, we show each bid so that you can raise or lower them all by a percentage or a fixed amount.
Conclusion
I see a lot of e-commerce advertisers with sub-optimal product groups. That’s why I’m excited about the fact that with Optmyzr you can now more easily create a great shopping structure and use that to improve bid management. Try it out and let me and the team know what you think…
When you set up an AdWords campaign you choose the locations you want to target based on where your prospective customers are located. However, it is not enough to just target locations especially when campaign targeting is set up at the country level. One way to make sure you’re optimizing campaigns for better ROI is to identify high performing and underperforming locations and setting bid adjustments for those.
For example, if you’re targeting the United States as a country, you’ll receive traffic from different states. California and Alaska may have completely different performance metrics but under the current structure you’re probably managing them in the same manner. This is why it is important to use geo bid adjustments to manage bids or if you want more granular control over budget, you can split them out into separate campaigns as well.
Setting bid adjustments for locations
Performance data at the country, city and region level is available in AdWords under the dimensions tab. However, taking that data and making it actionable can take hours. This is where the Geo Bid Adjustment One-Click Optimization™ can help. This optimization lets you see data at the country, region, city and postal code level. You can analyze performance, add locations as targets and set bid adjustments in a few minutes. This process can be done for multiple campaigns at the same time. In AdWords, it will take 3-4 steps to do this for each campaign. When you have to do it for multiple campaigns, you can easily spend a few hours doing it.
Why use the Geo Bid Adjustment One-Click Optimization™?
View geographic performance at any level (country, city, region). For example, if California is added as a target location, you can choose to view data at the city level and see how campaigns are performing across different cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles etc.
Automatically calculate bid adjustments based on goals. You can enter the target goal value for the account or campaign and the system will automatically recommend bid adjustments based on performance.
Set bid adjustments for locations that are not added as targets. If you choose to add a bid adjustment for a location that you’re not targeting, the system will automatically add it as a target location and set the bid adjustment.
Use aggregate data to set bid adjustments for campaigns that don’t have enough data. You can use the overall performance of a location to set geo bid adjustments for campaigns that don’t have enough data to make a decision.
When shopping campaigns are split at a very granular level like product id, each product group may not have enough data to make a bid decision. This makes it difficult to optimize these product groups creating a chicken and egg problem. You can’t optimize without data and you won’t get traffic if bids are set too low. In such cases, it helps if you can group product groups to create a critical mass and use aggregated data to set bids for product groups. We recently launched the roll up feature in the Shopping Bidder One-Click Optimization™ that is designed to do this. It makes it easier to set bids at scale by aggregating data for product groups.
How does the roll up feature in Shopping Bidder work?
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The first step is to select the metric by which you want to roll up data and the second step is to set the threshold for that metric.
Step 1: Select the metric by which you want to group or aggregate data
Step 2: Set the threshold for that metric
Step 3: Click update
Understanding the results
The tool will roll up product groups to the lowest level that meets the data threshold selected. For example, if you select clicks as the metric and the threshold is set to 500, the tool will show all product groups that have at least 500 clicks. Product groups that don’t have 100 clicks will be rolled up to the lowest level at which the threshold is met.
Product groups are rolled up and grouped together at the lowest level. The number of product groups in the group show in brackets (n) next to the name.
Sometimes there are a lot of product groups in a single group but the range for max cpc is broad. In this case, the tool further breaks it down into sub groups that have a smaller max CPC range. This helps set bids at a more granular level. You can click on the rolled up product group to see sub groups.
The max CPC in this case shows the range (min – max) for all product groups under the roll up. If the new CPC requires the bid to be increased by a percentage, this is applied on the max number in the range.
We’ve been pretty excited about the launch of Google Shopping ads since they’re a great way for retailers to highlight their products’ photos and prices. Unfortunately when running Shopping ads for thousands of products, bid management using the AdWords interface is a full time job: not because it’s difficult, but simply because the interface is excruciatingly slow when managing many products that are split across many campaigns and ad groups.
After confirming that this was a real problem with some other PPC folks at the HeroConf conference last month, we started building a bid management tool for Shopping Ads and today we’re excited to reveal it to the world.
[][1]Optmyzr’s Shopping Bidder Tool for AdWords makes setting the correct CPC for your shopping ads a quick and easy process that can easily be done for thousands of product groups in a matter of mere minutes.
Here’s how our Shopping Bidder works:
You get all the biddable items for your entire account on a single page.
You can filter the view to see just ROI positive, ROI negative, or items with no impressions or you can apply a custom filter using your own criteria like clicks, cost, impressions, etc.
You can change bids in bulk for all the items that meet your filter criteria, for example, lower all bids 10% for ROI negative items with at least 10 clicks in the past 30 days.
With one click, you can send the new bids to AdWords where they go live instantly.
This is much, much faster than doing the same in AdWords which has a few shortcomings:
You cannot see all biddable items from your entire account on one page. You have to open up every ad group one by one.
There are no filters for product groups so you have to manually find items that meet your criteria for needing a bid change.
To change a bid it takes several clicks to expand the product groups until you get to the level where bids can be set.
Initially this tool will � make bid management for Shopping ads a lot faster but when it becomes this easy, you’ll also find yourself splitting up your product groups ever more granularly, and that should further improve results.
We’re really excited to have this ready for our users today and we hope you’ll send us feedback about how we can make this even more useful for you.
When keywords don’t appear on the first page of search results, you’re losing out on a lot of potential traffic. The First Page Bridger identifies keywords that are just shy of making the first page with your current bids. With just a small increase in the bid, they’ll catch the train to more impressions rather than fall in the gap where they’ll be relegated to second-page oblivion.
Google assigns the first-page bid to each keyword. This bid is an estimate of the amount you need to bid to show up on the first page. It is not the same for all keywords or, even for the same keyword across accounts. It is calculated based on Quality Score and competition. The required first-page bid is relatively low for keywords with a good Quality Score. However, in competitive and saturated markets, you’ll find high first page bids for keywords with good Quality Scores (7- 10) as well.
The first-page bid is directional. It is the minimum required bid to show on the first page of search results. It doesn’t guarantee a high position.
Why is it important to show on the first page of search results?
Ad space on the first page of search results is prime real estate as most users don’t go beyond the first page when they are looking for something. Keywords showing on the first page of search results always get more traffic.
How to decide which keywords should be above the first-page bid?
This really depends on your budget and how important a keyword is to your business. If you have the budget, you can keep all your keywords above the first-page bid. However, if you have to choose, we recommend segmenting keywords into three sections based on impact and the required bid increase to meet the first page requirements. The easiest way to create these segments is by using tangible data. We recommend increasing bids for the first section of keywords.
Minimum increase, maximum impact: Keywords with a high Quality Score (7 – 10) and current bid just slightly (10 – 20%) below the first-page bid.
Medium increase, high impact: Keywords with a Quality Score between 5 to 6 and current bid 20 – 40% below the first page bid.
Maximum increase least impact: Keywords with a Quality Score lower than 5 and current bid 40%+ below the first-page bid.
How does Optmyzr help?
Our system analyzes performance data for each keyword and gives you a list of keywords that will have the highest impact with a minimum bid increase. You can choose to increase the bid to the first-page bid or, to a % slightly higher than the first-page bid for these keywords. The keywords the system recommends already have a good Quality Score and just need a little push in terms of bids. Increasing bids for these keywords gives them a chance to perform and can help get more traffic and sales. It is sometimes difficult to spot these keywords because they get ‘buried’ in the list of keywords that have bids below the required first-page bid. You can review and implement bid changes with just a click from within the Optmyzr interface.
Is changing bids (max CPC) for keywords the answer to reducing your cost/sale or CPA? The answer is no. Getting sales/conversions through AdWords or any SEM campaign is a three step process and changing bids for your keywords only helps with the first step.
Step 1: The search
A user types in a search query. Google matches the query with a keyword in your AdWords account and triggers your ad. The bid (along with other factors) decides which position your ad will show. The role of your keyword bid ends here.
Step 2: The click
Your ad is showing in the top position. Is your ad text relevant enough to your keyword? Will it compel the user to click on it? An optimized bid may get your ad ranked high but if your ad text is not good the user won’t click on it. One of the best ways to make your ad text relevant is to feature your keyword in it. Also, mention other USPs like free shipping, price points etc.
Step 3: The conversion
You get the click and the user is on your site! But it doesn’t end here. Does your landing page offer what the ad text promised? If your ad text promoted black shoes and the landing page leads to talks about a black dress, the user will probably just close the page. Unfortunately or fortunately, users want instant gratification. The landing page does offer what your ad text promised. How easy is it for a user to buy your product or, convert? How many steps does it take to get to your thank you page? Is your sign-up process too long?
To increase sales/conversions and to reduce CPA (cost/conversion), each of the above steps is important and changing bids only helps in the first step. This is why just changing bids or, using an automated bid management system that only changes bids, is not the solution. Next time someone tells you they can reduce the cost/sale for your SEM campaigns by just changing bids for your keywords, think again.
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