PPC bid management might be one of the most tedious tasks of your daily PPC routine.
The overall logic behind PPC bid management is pretty straightforward: you reward your best keywords with higher bids to maximize the impression share you get for these words and “punish” your loss leaders in order to prevent wasting your precious PPC budgets. Sounds simple, however, in real life, it might be extremely time-consuming.
There are a number of ways you can automate bidding: you can, for example, set rules in your Google Ads interface to change your bids once your keywords hit specific criteria according to what a good or bad performance means for your account. Alternatively, you can play around with automated bidding strategies within your Google or Microsoft Ads account or use specialized 3rd party real-time PPC bidding software.
The game becomes even more complicated when you start using bid adjustments (and often, you should be using them). If you find that a certain time of day, audience, or device is doing really well, it’s easy to increase your bids for these specific situations applying bid adjustments. If you find that there’s an age range or location where you are not doing well, it’s easy to lower your bids using bid adjustments. However, bid adjustments can be tricky to work with if you don’t understand how they are used, especially together with automated bidding strategies.
Adalysis offers a range of automated PPC bid management tools to simplify PPC bid management.
If your campaign(s) have manual CPC as a bidding strategy, Adalysis performs regular checks of whether you could benefit from increasing/decreasing your bids. To compute the best bids, Adalysis takes into account multiple signals for each keyword, such as Quality Score, lost search Impression share due to rank, Google estimates for specific positions, search volume, as well as performance history based on the goal you want to achieve.
By default, all computations are made with the goal of increasing conversions (if you are not tracking conversions in your account, your default bidding strategy will be to increase clicks). However, you can personalize the settings and instead focus on achieving a specific Target CPA or ROAS, or increase overall traffic to your website.
The Bid Adjustment Map will show you all the bid adjustments your campaigns are using. This tool will notify you when your bid adjustments are being ignored because they are incompatible with your chosen automated bidding strategy.
Also, Bid Adjustment Map will highlight situations when your bid adjustments are changing your CPA’s instead of CPCs. For example, imagine that for one of your campaigns you are bidding manually, set a +50% mobile device adjustment and then you switch to CPA bidding. CPA bidding, in this case, will use the +50% device adjustment to increase your target CPA (not your bid). In such cases, you might think the CPA bidding isn’t performing well for you, while in reality, the results are worse because of the forgotten bid adjustment for mobile devices. Bid Adjustment Map will guide you to avoid these false conclusions.
You’ll also be able to track how changing your bid adjustments impacted your performance to understand what works best for you.
Obviously, your campaigns are not performing equally well throughout a week or even a day. To analyze hourly and weekly trends, you can access the Adalysis Hourly Performance tool and see a visual heatmap showing what time of day your CTR, Conversions and other important metrics hit the highest level. You can also compare your performance over weekend vs weekdays.
Straight from there, you will be able to set bid adjustments for your best performing hours of the day and create ad schedules only showing your ads when your customers are more likely to convert.
Once your campaigns have been running for some time, Adalysis will provide you with automated recommendations regarding bid adjustments for devices, locations and demographic groups. From now on you don’t have to analyze tons of data to see if some device, location or age group is performing worse than another and then calculating how big the bid adjustment should be and if it’s compatible with your current bid strategy. Adalysis will do all of this for you!
You can also easily change the default settings for defining “good” or “bad” performance to adjust the tool specifically for your needs.
In Google Ads or Microsoft Ads, you normally see how your locations, demographic targeting and devices performed on the campaign level. However, there might be times when you would like to identify your best performers across your entire account. This information will be particularly useful when trying to better understand your ideal customer and create your buyer persona.
Adalysis allows you to aggregate your performance across all campaigns and ad groups with a click of a button.
Apart from automated PPC bid management tools, Adalysis PPC software offers solutions for optimizing your entire PPC performance.
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Adalysis was founded in 2013 by PPC experts with more than 20 years of experience under their belt. Since then, we have helped PPC agencies, in-house PPC marketers and small business owners from all over the world to optimize their PPC efforts in the most cost-effective way.