What is a Bid Strategy?
A bid strategy determines the way you bid in paid advertising platforms for your ads to show up in available spaces.
For instance, if you want Google to place your ads in SERPs (search engine results pages), you must bid in Google Ads.
Google can also place your ads in blog pieces, news, or any other kind of webpage.
However, other places to have your ads can be Instagram or Facebook.
Take the case of Facebook. You'd need to follow a Facebook bid strategy to get Facebook to display your ads.
How do you Define a Bid Strategy?
Different paid advertising campaigns might have different advertising goals, depending on the needs of your business.
Those goals may be getting:
Depending on your goals, you should optimize bids in different ways.
What Type of Bid Strategy should you Use?
1. Clicks
If your primary goal is to generate paid traffic to your website, you want users to click on your ads. So, your bid strategy should be CPC (cost per click) bidding.
And you can go two ways
- Automate bids. You rely on the paid advertising platform to define bids for you based on your budget. By doing so, the platform maximizes the number of clicks on your ads.
- Bid manually. You set bids for each ad group in your campaign or individual target keywords within an ad group.
2. Impressions
If you want users to simply view your ads go for a bid strategy based on your ads' visibility. That's a legitimate strategy of raising your brand's awareness.
You can pay per one thousand served impressions —that's the CPM (cost per thousand served impressions) bidding. Or you can choose a variant of CPM.
For instance, you can set a maximum average CPM that you'd pay—the tCPM (target cost per thousand served impressions) bidding. That would optimize your bids and maximize impressions.
Or you can determine a manual vCPM (cost per thousand viewable impressions).
3. Conversions
An automated bid strategy is adequate for advertisers who wish to increase their website conversion rate.
You can opt to:
- Target a specific CPA (cost per action)
- Target a specific ROAS (return on ad spend)
- Spend your entire budget instead of targeting a specific CPA or ROAS
- Automatically adjust your manual bids for maximum conversions—that would be an eCPC (enhanced cost per click)
4. Views or Interactions (Video Ads Only)
In the case of video ads, the most adequate bid strategy is CPV (cost per view) bidding.
With such a bid strategy, you'll pay for video views. But that's not all. You'll also pay for clicks on CTA (call to action) overlays, YouTube cards, or companion banners.
In a CPV bidding, you just need to define the highest price you want to pay per view or interaction.
How Can We Help?
Want a bidding strategy session to help you choose and set up your paid advertising campaign?
Get in touch with us to partner with a PPC provider who can guide you through your bidding journey.
