PPC Bid Management can sometimes be an overwhelming task, even for the most experienced PPC account managers. However, don’t fret, I’m here to break it all down for you.

The Google Ads platform essentially runs like an online auction. Advertisers bid on their keywords in Google Search and on their products in Google Shopping. Google then delves into its pool of potential advertisers measuring certain factors such as the quality & relevance of your keywords & ads, plus the competitiveness of your bid.

After examining all of that, Google will determine the position of the ads in the search engine results page (SERP) & on the shopping carousel and this is all done in less than a matter of seconds!

So, bid management is simply monitoring and adjusting the bids of your keywords and products so that your ads can place higher and more regularly on the SERP.

From the agency side, it’s vital to clarify with our clients what targets and goals they want to achieve for their account and we can set out a bid management strategy from there.

Typically, e-commerce retailers want to make a return on the investment that they put into Google Ads. We call this ‘ROAS’ which stands for Return On Ad Spend and is most commonly referred to in Google Ads as Conversion Value/Cost.

Retailers that want to generate leads tend to want keep each acquisition below a certain cost. This is called ‘CPA’ which stands for Cost Per Acquisition and is listed in Google Ads as Cost/Conversion.

Why is it important?

Bid management is super important because it is built into the very foundation of PPC and it’s one of the main things that you can change to have a direct and obvious impact on an account’s performance.

When making bid changes, you are simply telling Google that you are now willing to pay higher or lower in the auction for someone to click on your ad and that means that you may outrank the competition.

During the learning phase of PPC, bid management tends to be the task which strikes fear into the eyes of soon-to-be PPC Account Managers as they know even the most incremental bid changes can have significant outcomes on the Google Auction.

It’s also imperative that PPC bid management is done right,  here is how we do it at Mabo:

• Conversion bid increases – when looking at the data in the Google Ads platform, we filter all of the keywords or products to see which specific items have converted and at what return. If this return figure is above the client’s target, then we will increase the bid. This is usually between 5-20% increases depending on the data.

• Conversion bid decreases – the exact opposite to the bid increases. So, if any keywords or products are converting at a return figure lower than the client’s target, we will need to decrease those bids.

• Non-conversion bid decreases – The final step we take is to filter all of the items that haven’t converted and decrease any that have spent over or near to the average order value for that account.

To summarise, bid management is one of the main tasks that can make or break an account so ensuring that you have a pre-set target to work towards and a sound strategy in place, then you will be winning at PPC!