Google Ads Bidding Strategies: The Only Guide You'll Ever Need (With Free Cheat Sheet)

Hey, this is Austin from Grow My Ads and in today's video I'm going to talk about a very important topic and that's bid strategies. I have seen accounts get completely wrecked because they chose the incorrect bid strategy at the incorrect time. So I've built a complete cheat sheet. It breaks down different bid strategies that you can choose from. I'm going to go through each one of those, what they are, when to use them. I'm going to give you scenarios. What do you do for a brand new account? What do you do for a brand new campaign? What do you do for an existing account with lots of data but you're building out a brand new campaign? I've got all those scenarios broken. Now I'm going to give you a complete guide on how to navigate all those bid strategies and I'm going to show you a real life case inside of an account where they made the incorrect bid strategy at the incorrect time and it completely wiped them out. Hopefully this video will help you scale correctly with with bid optimizations and not wipe you out like the case study I'm going to show you. Let's dive in. Before we get into the nitty gritty of all the different bid strategies. None of that's going to matter if you have a broken foundation. So number one, foundation bidding is not going to fix a broken account or broken strategy. What is more important than the bidding is proper account structure offer. Is your conversion tracking set up correctly? Are you utilizing the right keywords? Website ux? Can you. Do you actually even convert right now? Do you have a terrible slow website or your checkout process is horrendous? And budget, do you even have the budget to make this work in a lot of cases for smaller spenders? They just don't. And so all of that is important. I've talked to many people over my years and they think bidding somehow is magically going to make a broken account foundation work. It's not the case. You have to have all of these pieces in place and set up correctly before bidding is even going to work for you. All bidding is is a tool to dial in the math to hit your goal. Usually that's going to be some form of a profit goal. So bidding is not some magic solution to make an account work. Bidding just steers the ship. Once you have the ship built correctly, the ultimate goal of bidding is to get your campaigns to 30 plus conversions in a 30 day timeframe. So why is that? Years ago I can remember now. I've been in this game a little too Long, you would manually bid a keyword. So if I had a keyword, let's say plumbers, St. Pete, Florida, and I put a $50 bid on that, I would be paying about $50 or in the variance of that very small, you know, percent difference there, up or down. But I'm saying, hey, I want to pay 50 for this. That was through manual bidding. It worked wonderfully. Fast forward today, smart bidding is the absolute necessary bidding strategy that you're going to need in order to really scale a campaign. It just works wonderfully. Years ago was horrendous, but Google's algorithm has really improved over the years. And so if you're not utilizing smart bidding today, you are losing out. It works in 98% of the cases that we can get campaigns dialed in on. So your goal actually is to get your campaign dialed in to start utilizing smart bidding. So why do you need 30 conversions? That is just what we have found. You may see people say lower or higher. I've heard 50, I've heard 100, but 30 to me, like one conversion a day for about 30 days. If you can make that happen, then the smart bidding seems to behave how you would like to. If you have less than 30 and you try to flick over to a smart bidding strategy, normally what happens is the campaign suffocates out. You'll, you'll hear me say suffocate a lot. Or when talking about that, it tries to go get you a conversion and clicks. And all of a sudden you just start seeing this decrease in impressions and clicks and pretty soon the thing flatlines. It's a dead patient at that point. And so you have to, your job in the beginning is to get that conversion data in, even if it's unprofitable. You just want to get those 30 conversions so you can start utilizing a smart bid strategy, whether that's a maximized conversion or conversion value with a cap, which we'll talk about. And then you start massaging the campaign into the profit range that you need it to be. And so I'll give you some examples of that. But just to start, that is the number one thing you should be working on is how do I get volume of conversions? Consistent volume. So 30 plus in a 30 day time frame is what you're looking at. So, and I do make a little note here, you don't have to hit 30 conversions per month to successfully make Google Ads work, but it just makes the game way harder. We do have some B2B, which is like low, low volume on conversions. We have some B2B clients that we successfully use Google Ads for. And in some cases we are using smart bidding still. And it is working. It's just very finicky when things go wrong. So if you have like a dead week where you just don't get any conversion volume, all of a sudden the smart bidding be acts up. And so smart bidding is super finicky. That's why consistency and volume of conversions is the most important because then you can work with it. But when you have low volume, it's just, it's really hard to make work. So I am not saying there's not an account out there that has less than 30 conversions that isn't using successfully smart bidding strategies. Not saying that's the case. However, from our experience of managing millions of dollars of ad spend per month, we see that you definitely have to be within that 30 plus per range of conversions on the campaign. That's one individual campaign in order for the smart bidding to behave in a way that makes it easy to manage and optimize. Okay, so let's talk about the different bid strategies. I'm going to go into some scenarios with you. So we have built this bidding cheat sheet table. It gives you all the different strategies here you'll see inside of an account. I'll just hop into one real quick for you. Okay, so I am inside of a campaign, I'm inside the settings here. And if you go to the section called bidding, this is where you would actually choose the bid strategy. Right. So we have maximize clicks, you have maximized conversions, you have maximized conversion value, you have target impression share and then you have manual cpc. So here we would, when I say smart bidding, it's these right here. Max clicks, max conversions, max conversion value, target impression share. They're labeled automated bid strategy. So you're leaning into, to Google's smart bidding, you're leaning into their automation. And their algorithm manual is more like you choosing hey, I want to pay $5. And so it's kind of an outdated bid strategy at this point, but we still use it today. I'm going to give you those cases. So just a heads up, when I say smart bidding, I'm talking about this, these automated bid strategies here. All right, flicking back to the cheat sheet. So we have all the bid strategies broken out, all about them. I'm not going to read through this for you. And then when to use. So let's start with a brand new account. What do you do on a brand new account? You've never ran ads before. What is the bid strategy you should be utilizing. All right, number one, if you're launching a brand new account with no historical data, your only goal is to get conversions. Forget profit, you will not be profitable. It's just not going to happen. When we have brand new accounts come to us, which at this point we rarely take on. But if it's brand new, I always tell them, look, you're going to spend minimum of 90 days buying data. I like to use the word invest, invest in that data just to see can we even make this work for us long term. That 90 day, first 90 day period of a brand new account on all it is is investing and getting data. So your goal during that is just to get conversion volume going. You're not going to be profitable. Normally we have made it happen in, in some special cases, but usually it's just not going to. In some cases I'm like, it's going to take you six months probably to dial this in. But 90 days has usually been a safe timeframe to use. I think most agencies are probably going to tell you the same. And so a win for a brand new account is after 90 days you have enough conversion data to feel confident that you can actually make this work. And you've got enough conversion data that you're now utilizing smart bidding. So why do I say now utilize smart bidding? It's because you want to start with manual CPC bidding, turn enhanced conversions off. Or if you've got a lot of budget to work with and you just want to get that conversion data, you want to get a lot of clicks quickly, then start with a max clickbid strategy with no bid cap. And so I'm going to show you again, I'm going to hop into those settings. So if this were a brand new account, a brand new campaign I'm setting up, I would actually be using manual CPC bid strategy. Here you see this piece? This is the enhanced cpc. So enhanced CPC is utilizing a bit of smart bidding. So I'm actually, when I start a brand new campaign on a brand new account, I start with manual CPC and then I do not turn on enhanced cpc. What enhanced CPC does is it can help Google will basically have the ability to increase your bid. So let's say you give it a 10 manual CPC bid and then you have enhanced CPC on it gives you're giving Google the ability to bid more than $10 for what they believe is a higher converting click. However, if you're a brand new account, there is no conversion data for that to work. So there's no Point of even turning it on. So brand new account, start with manual cpc, turn off enhanced CPC when you first get going, then back to the sheet here. How do you even determine your initial bit? Okay, so people in my opinion overthink this. There is no perfect starting bid. You just got to start bidding. You got to get out there and start getting some action. And so this kind of goes back to foundation. You need to do proper keyword research. I will create a keyword research video in the future. We do have a full post on it on our website. I've linked to on how to do keyword research. But again, I will do a video for everyone in the future on that and then link it here when that time comes. But basically what you want to do is if Google shows a keyword CPC, it's going to be $10 on the low end or 30 on the high. Then just kind of find the median there and start there. So I'm going to hop into keyword planner tool here. All right, so I'm inside of the keyword planner tool inside of a Google Ads account. I put plan plumber near me. I'm inside of targeting St. Petersburg, Florida and here it starts giving you some data. So this would be a part of the keyword research process. But you see top of page bid, low range for plumber near me is $36. Top of page high range is 113. As I said, there is no perfect bid in the beginning. You just want to get some action going. And so I normally would start somewhere in the median between these two numbers. So you know, depends on how conservative or aggressive you want to be. In this case though, just using like a normal sort of situation, I probably would choose a bid 50 to $70 range and I would start there. I would see what the data shows over the next few days, reassess, and then make adjustments from there. But this is where you start. You're going to need to get some action going. And again, forget profitability on a brand new account, you, you just want to start here and look at getting on the top of the page if you're on the bottom. If you go way too low, you want to be way too conservative. You're just not going to get any action. It's going to take forever. So median of these numbers usually is a good play to get going. Okay. Another thing you need to be aware of, do you even have the budget to make Google Ads work? I just showed you an example of a plumber in St. Petersburg and clicks start at the bottom of $36 just to be on the top page. Bottom 36. High end was over 100. All right, so if you're starting and you only have $1,000 per month, not saying there aren't plumbers out there who make $1,000 per month work. I'm just saying it's extremely hard when you're paying $50 a click or $100 a click and you only have a thousand dollars per month. So this goes back to foundation. You must have the budget to even make this work, because how are you going to get 30 conversions if you only have month and you're paying 50 to $100 per click? You're not. So usually what happens in those cases is you spend three months spending $1,000 per month and then you have no data. You do. You have not enough data to make any judgment calls. So budget is very important when it comes to your bidding, because do you even have the budget to get the volume of conversions you would want to make smart bidding work? Again, I'm not saying you can't successfully advertise for $1,000 per month. It's going to vary depending on your industry, depending on the bids it takes to even operate in some of those spaces. So like I would say personal injury. I use an example here. If you are in personal injury, $1,000 per month is not going to do anything for you. Those clicks are all $100 plus. And so what are you going to get 10 clicks and try to make that work? It's just not going to happen. And so you're just not going to get the heat that you need in order to make it happen. So put that tidbit in there. You need to have the correct budget first before you even think about bid strategies. Because if you don't have the budget, then you're never going to be able to get to some of the smart bid strategies that you're going to want to utilize to help scale an account. Okay, bidding for an existing account, what do you do in this case? This is actually simple. At least keep it simple. A lot of people will over complicate this. If you have data to work off, you don't really have to go too crazy with this. So if you're getting the 30 plus conversions in a campaign, you've got the volume. It's now time to start utilizing smart bidding. If you're not currently. So you can start moving to a maximized conversion with a tcp, a cap. If you're going after a cost per acquisition goal or a Max conversion value bid strategy with a T roas cap if you have a return on ad spend goal. So what TCPA T roas cap should you set initially? Well, you can't force smart bidding to make the impossible happen. You have to work with what it's getting and then you massage it over time. So for an example, clients and electrician. Our goal is $100 CPA. Our campaign, electrician General. This is targeting just General Electrician. Keywords conversions over the last 30 days. 50. All right, we've got the volume. We've got plenty of volume there for the smart bidding to work. CPA lasts 30 days. 120. All right, so we're $20 over the goal of 100. Current bid strategy is set to a max conversion with no CPA cap. So we have maximized conversions. We're telling Google just go get conversions for us. And it's got 50 for us in the last 30 days. But it's high. It's too high. We're unprofitable right now by $20. So what do you do? Well, I've seen in many cases a lot of people just go in and they try to set it to $100 CPA because that's their goal, even though it's not quite hitting 100 for them. And then it just doesn't work. Volume dies off. And so in this case, what you're going to want to do is flick over to a targeted CPA bid strategy, the maximized conversion with a, with a cap. So if I'm inside of an actual campaign, let's go to that. All right, so I'm inside of a campaign here where I would be setting the bidding here for this example. So I would be choosing max conversions. But now you see the settings set a target cost per acquisition. This is where I would be setting this number. So in this case, I think I'd be at a 110 based off the scenario I was talking about with the electrician. So why did I choose 110? Because we're averaging 120. My goal is 100. I can't just force it to 100. So what I like to normally do is set it to target CPA around what the average is, but then decrease it by about 10%. So I'm forcing the smart bidding to, to improve what it was getting in the last 30 days. But I'm not trying to make it make the impossible happen. In this case, I'm probably going to be, yeah, 120 to 112 range when I first Set this, then let it run for about a week or two. Analyze the data. Are you satisfied with the volume you're still getting? Is the CPA trending in this range that you set the CPA cap to? If yes, then you can start nudging your CPA down again. I'm recommending increments of 10 to 20%. You don't want big swings. Big swings do not work well with smart bidding. So after a week or two, let's say I'm hitting 112 or whatever my goal was set to, I would actually feel comfortable then moving it down to $100 CPA. So that's why, you know, when we're talking to clients and we have it, a campaign like this, they're saying, well, it's unprofitable. They're saying, give it some time. It's going to. It's going to take a few weeks, but could take 30 days. Give it some time. We have to work our way to profitability. You can't just force it. Otherwise, what happens is you're going to kill volume. Let me show you an exact example of an account that made the wrong bid change and it killed volume. Okay. I am inside of an account that absolutely wrecked their account by making the wrong bid strategy change. So you'll see, before September 20th of 2023, they were getting some decent conversion volume. They were getting, you know, two to five conversions a day. Their. Their average CPA here is around $50. Well, what happened? Things just kind of tanked out. You know, if I look at this from a weekly standpoint and just. You do not want to see this with your conversions. So what happened? Well, here's what happened. If I go to. You see how the cost drop, too. If I go to impressions and I go to clicks, this thing just completely collapsed. Google stopped giving us any impressions. It was, you know, in the hundreds per day, and it was below 100 per day. Then after the bid change was made. So what exactly happened? They changed the bid strategy too low. So they were getting a $50 CPA, and they just all of a sudden set that CPA goal to half that. So they were down to a $25 CPA. It killed the campaign. It completely suffocated out because Google, the smart bidding, did not have any historical data to work off of where it could just magically cut your CPA in half. So what did it do? It killed the volume of the campaign. I've seen this time and time again. You cannot make big swings on your bid changes. So if you're hitting a 50 CPA and you want to start working it down to a 25 first you got to, you got to see if. Is that even possible? Look at your average CPC, look at your conversion rate, etc. In this case, it's not even possible to hit a $25 CPA. But if you were trying to move from 50 to 25, do it in 10% increments down. So go from 50 to maybe 45 or 40 40. If you're being aggressive, then what happens after a week or two weeks of making that change? Is volume good? Is CPA still good? Then start working it further. What happens though? Eventually if you're trying to go too low, you're trying to squeeze too much, efficiency is all sudden the smart bidding just goes, nope, can't get that for you. Drops. They'll give you like 10 impressions. A couple clicks. The campaign's dead at that point and you have to revive it. That's exactly what happened in this case. All right, bidding for a brand new campaign inside existing accounts. So you have an account that's already running, you've got plenty of historical data. Can you just go straight into using smart bidding for this brand new campaign? Well, yes and no. If the campaign is bidding on keywords that you have already been bidding on or getting in existing campaigns, so a dynamic search ad campaign, or maybe it's another search campaign and you're now segmenting into another new campaign for those type of terms, then you technically can just start with smart bidding from the jump. So using the plumber example or electrician example up here, if I had a new campaign I was building now and I was taking some of these electrician keywords here, and to build a new one out, I could build a new campaign and flick it to $100 CPA bid strategy right from the get go. And Google usually will work with that. It's got enough data points in the account on those search terms. If it doesn't work, then flick over to like a max conversions, get the conversion data in again, you have an account with conversion data, historical conversion data. So you can start this brand new campaign off utilizing at least a max conversion bid strategy or conversion value, depending on what your goal is at that time. Then once you get the conversion data and then you flick back over to a CPA or a troas, depending on what strategy you're using Again. If you're a brand new account though, you have no historical data. That's why you can't just switch to a Max conversion strategy right away because it has no conversion data to even work off of. All right. What do you do though on a brand new campaign for brand new keywords? Let's say you're, you're launching a new product category and these are keywords you've never ran before in the account. There's no data whatsoever in your account for these type of keywords. It doesn't matter if you spend $100,000 per month. You have to now treat these as almost like a brand new account. So in this particular case, a brand new campaign with brand new keywords inside of an existing account. Start with manual bidding or max click bidding with whatever cap that you would want to set. So there are several scenarios for you on on the bid strategies. Here's the cheat sheet sheet we give you about them and when to use. I don't think I need to read through all of those, but just to recap, if you're a brand new account, start with manual bidding or max clicks, depending on how aggressive you want to get. And your only goal is to start getting conversion volume to eventually start utilizing smart bidding. If you're utilizing smart bidding, then you want to eventually dial in your goal, whether that's a CPA goal or ROAS goal. So how do you get there? Well, you can't just magically flick it over to your goal if your campaign historically hasn't been hitting your goal. So use the average the last 30 days the campaign's been hitting. So again, we use the electrician example in this account. In the last 30 days at 50 conversions, at $120cpa, I would flick over to a max conversion with a CPA cap of 120, let that run for a few weeks, then start decreasing my CPA down to eventually hit my goal of $100. Do the vice versa if you're using a targeted ROAS goal. So instead of cpa, you're just now playing around with ROAS numbers there. But start with the average of the campaign, then work your way down to dial in the profitability of it. But you can't just magically set it to what your profit number is and hope that Google will just make it happen. You're going to end up with the case that I showed you where the campaign just suffocates completely out. I've also included a bid adjustment cheat sheet here. This is from Optimizer. I linked to them to give them credit. This just shows you what bid strategy you're using and what bid adjustments can you make at like the device level, ad schedule, audience, etc. Put that in there, though, just in case you're looking at bid adjustments. I'm not going to go fully into making bid adjustments here, but just know if you're utilizing some of the smart bid strategies, bid adjustments don't do anything for those, so this is a good reference to have in this cheat sheet as well. All right, there you go. There's a breakdown of the bid strategies, what bid strategy use when, when not to use a bid strategy. I even show you a case of an account that got completely wiped out because they used the wrong bid strategy at the wrong time. I hope I prevent you from making that change. I hope I make you some money. Make sure to subscribe and I'll see you on the next video.