Best Bidding Practices For Adwords

In PPC (Pay Per Click) marketing, the cost per click is the final price that you need to pay whenever somebody clicks on your advertisement to visit your web page. While some networks apply various mathematical equations to the amount you bid to determine the amount you pay, a click will never cost you more than your bid price. In order for a PPC campaign to be considered effective and worthwhile, the bid price needs to be low enough to ensure that you yield a profit on the campaign, and high enough to generate some traffic.

Determining Your Maximum Bid Level

Monitoring all of your PPC campaigns and ensuring that you never bid above your desired cost per click, will help to ensure you get the best results. Remember that the various forms of online advertisements will usually generate different traffic demographics. This may mean that PPC clicks may be more or less likely to convert, so you should use your web analytics to monitor the behaviour of your PPC visitors. The constant monitoring of a campaign is essential, otherwise what was once a profitable ad campaign could soon be extremely costly. Alternatively you might find that you are not placing for your most important keywords.

Bidding Strategies

Every campaign requires different bidding strategies. Some keywords will prove more profitable than others, so it will be necessary to determine a maximum cost per click for each campaign. As well as finding disparity between keyword campaigns, you will also find differences between the PPC networks, even for the same keywords. The more popular networks inevitably require higher bids for the more prominent positions.

Top Spot Isn't Always Best

Top spot isn't always the best spot. Having your ad in the most prominent position on a page isn't necessarily the best strategy for all campaigns or all keywords. The top position can cost a prohibitive amount of money because many pages will be vying for this spot. However, this isn't the only reason that top position isn't necessarily the best. When surfers use the search engines to look for pages, they have a tendency to click the first advertisement without reading the full ad. This is before they have fully refined their search and can result in a considerably lower conversion rate than an ad that ranks in second or third spot.

Gaps In Bid Prices

Gaps in bid prices do exist. Top two positions could cost a very similar amount, with one bid only being one or two pence higher than the next. This is usually caused by a bidding war and third spot may also be involved. However, except with the most popular and the most general of keywords, there will usually be areas where gaps appear in the bid prices. By taking of advantage of these gaps it is possible to greatly reduce the amount you pay without having too much negative impact on the amount of traffic you receive as a result.

PPC Bidding Strategies

It is important that you have a firm maximum bid in your mind before you even start the keyword research phase of a PPC campaign. The maximum bid will determine how much profit you can make over the space of a single campaign. By constantly tracking performance and bid prices, you can optimise your bidding to take advantage of lulls in prices, new price gaps, and even seasonal trends that might appear. You should also evaluate your maximum bid on a regular basis to ensure that you are still bidding profitably or that you aren't missing out on more traffic by bidding too low.