Bid Management

The evolution of PPC bid management

While I won’t say bid management was ever simple, there was a time when things were much more transparent. In the days of GoTo and Overture, bids were so transparent that bid jamming was a common practice; companies would bid a penny less than the max bid of their competitors to force them to pay the highest possible price.

Then along came Google AdWords, where the final CPC became dependent on the Quality Score. While you could still see your max CPC, the bid that was used in the auction became impossible to know.

Despite this opaqueness, the bids were still easy to see because every keyword had a max CPC, and that was the end of it. If you wanted to bid more in different regions, you’d simply create a mirror campaign with different bids. It was easy to look at the CPC column next to a keyword to instantly figure out how high a bid was.

With the introduction of bid adjustments, things got way more complicated. When using bid modifiers, the maximum CPC is just a starting point, and the actual bid is the result of multiplying that bid with all the applicable bid modifiers.

Because AdWords doesn’t show us what those modifiers are on the same page where we see keyword bids, there’s no easy way to quickly see how much we’re willing to spend for a keyword.

So this month, I’d like to share an AdWords reporting script that will give you instant clarity about your bid ranges. Using AdWords scripts, we can look up the highest and lowest bid modifiers in effect for dayparts and geographies in each campaign. We can also find the mobile bid adjustments for each ad group.

Unfortunately, scripts don’t have access to audience bid modifiers, so if you’re using those (and you probably should), then just keep that in mind as you review the data.

http://searchengineland.com/really-know-much-youre-bidding-253266

Easy AdWords Bidding Strategies for Newbies & Math Haters

http://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2016/05/11/easy-adwords-bidding-strategies