Bid Management for Audience Targeting in Google Ads

Google Ads allows you to target different kind of audiences, in a Search Only Campaign, in two modes, 1) Targeting 2) Observation, I will discuss here the second kind of setting only, because first kind is dedicated to the targeting of the kind of targeted audience only.

There are three kind of scenarios emerging out of three kind of bid strategy: 1) No bid changes, only audiences are added. 2) If there are three audiences viz, A, B & C, in the order of importance giving incremental bid like 10%, 20% and 30% respectively. 3) Again if there are 3 audiences just like the previous, assigning bids in reverse order choosing decremental order like -30%, -20% and -10%. Now let us compare outcome of the three: In Scenario:1 Traffic through A, B & C will be governeed by the Default Bid and over a period of time you can allot a bit of incremental factor depending upon your analysis.

In Scenario: 2 All the audiences chosen will attract incremental bid over default and you would be bidding lower for the traffic which has not been marked by Google as belonging to a particular audience. So, you would be attracting more people on your website who has already been to many websites like yours before.

In Scenario:3 All the audiences chosen will get lesser than default and hence you are bidding higher for the traffic which has yet not been marked by google. It means you are spending more for the people who are fresh into market.

Now compare this with the real life situatrion where X,Y and Z all goes to the market looking for a product. X has the propensity to close sale in one or two shot, while Y in 5 shots aand z will keep bargaining the whole day.

Being a seller chances of sale happening is higher for X then Y and then Z. Scenario 3 gives you the best setting where you spend more for X and less for Y and Z, while though counterintuitive Scenario: 2 you are spending more for Z types and less for X and Y. You will lag behind competitors.

The more the no of sites a visitor visits less likely he is to buy. If a person visits 10 websites than sales probability is only 10%, I would strongly advise you to go for Scenario:3 kind of bid strategy for good results. Always bid more for Untagged traffic than marked audiences.

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Right Side Search Ads Disappeared- Implications !

Post February, 23rd, 2016, Google Adwords has stopped showing Paid Ads on Right Hand side of the search result pages.

To adjust with the new situation, advertisers need to tune their campaigns.

Following Implications are immediate concerns:

1. Reduced number of ads will show on the Search Result Page. Although Google has increased the number of Top Listing from 3 to 4, this is only for Highly Commercial queries
2. Search ads will show on Top and bottom of the Organic Results. It means number of ads on a page will vary from 3to7. How frequent bottom ads shows is not certain. Even if we assume 7 ads on a page, its a drop from earlier 11-14. Huge!
3. Only Exception so far disclosed are Product Listing Ads, PLAs Or Shopping ads, which are eligible to appear on the right side.
4. It is not clear whether, ads without extensions and all other bells & whistles are allowed to enter the Top or not. Documented Position so far which perhaps still holds is such ads get preference. So, if your campaign contains only ads and keywords, they will be worst hit with this change.

Your To-Do List after the change:

1. Immediately extract Top Vs Other Report and calculate the bid to cope with the situation.
2. Study the Competitors Report via Details tab. How many have outranked you how many times and figure out How to survive in the changed ecosystem.
3. Create as many extensions as possible. Although only 3 can show at a time, you never know which will give you extra punch and impressions, when others fail to trigger.
4. Make your campaign as much feature loaded as possible. More features you add more likely they are to appear
5. Elevate your bidding to the level of CPA/Portfolio. It would act as a hedge against crazy competition. Let Google’s algorithm take care of your Cost of Acquisition.

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Flexible Bidding, Solution for Top Clicks

Flexible Bidding, is the new kind of bidding strategy option added by Google, in the past few months in accounts across the world. This Option you can find clicking on the settings tab, choosing from bidding options. To activate it, you have to set it up through Shared Library.

Go to Shared Library, click on bids and find, Target Search Page Location >Top of the Search Page, Option. You will find details of this bidding strategy on the following pages, which has several advanced options for you to set up according to your preferences. Give it a name(e.g., TopClick) and click save. It will start showing as an option in Bidding Options in settings and also in Bid Strategy Tab at Campaign, adgroup and keyword pages. You can also create another strategy, say Maximize clicks within budget. You can shift between different strategies through,the Bid Strategy Tab. Flexible Bidding has Target Search Page Location and Maximize Clicks as Bid Strategy type. You may choose either Target Top of the page, or First page as option in the first type.

What Top of the Search Bidding does?

If you have chosen, Top of the Search Page option, it will dynamically raise and lower your bid to produce maximum above the fold clicks. The greatest merit of the algorithm behind this is that it adjusts different bids for different keywords, taking into account Quality Score and probably budget too. It is wise enough to judge what percentage of keywords should be given top bids, if enabled for entire campaign or adgroup. You can also enable it for one, two or more keywords!

Whenever, you want, you may shift to manual bidding through simple click on Bidding Strategy.
For those who were unhappy with the absence of position preference and run the rule now option should find this as a better solution. It is indeed better and economical than earlier features, retired now, intended to produce top rank click on adwords ads.

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Adwords Keyword Level Automation for Top Position!

Some Keywords are highly competitive.

Some advertisers just want to be on top by bidding too high.

Point to be noted here is that, it is not Your Bid that you are charged for, rather it is the bid of the ad just below you that determines what You pay.

You can beat the highest bidder through Smart bidding strategy. She will feel the heat of the competition only when you make her pay for the position and force her come below you. Once bitten twice shy!

Two automated rules does your job smartly.

Just choose the position you want to target your immediate competitor, say 1. Now set the rule of increasing the bid by 20% whenever your position is worse than 1, and also set another rule simultaneously, to decrease the bid whenever the position is better than 2.

When your aggressive competitor will start really paying for what she is aggressively bidding, she will be forced to run out of the competition and will change her strategy. Note you pay according to what the advertiser below you bid and not what you bid, that is just the limit.

Slowly you will find your aggressive competitor adopting a more rational bidding strategy, giving you room to move up.

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How Adwords has changed from 2006 to 2011

Google Adwords has changed a lot, since I started using it for marketing.

In 2006 everything was simple from interface to managing. Google kept on introducing new features and things became more complex thereafter. People were shy of targeting content network. I remember, clients used to tell specifically – No content targeting. Now, scenario has changed and people do want to see their sites on premium content listings. Those who were targeting content initially were very fortunate people. Lesser advertisers targeted it. Still lesser monitored them closely, and very few knew the real magic of this network. 

Now the scenario has changed completely with many advertisers monitoring it and in many segments there is nearly war for impressions. Publisher network too has gone smarter, they too monitor the result very closely and knows the optimal layout to make the battle fiercer.

Search Targeting too has evolved with idea of match types and adtext writing becoming more common than before. It is no more confined within the network of professionals, rather advertisers are highly familiar with the concept within their niche.

Keeping watch on their competitors is very common among advertisers. This is also because internet has now become the premier weapon in their marketing arsenal, which earlier used to be TV and print media. If you change your ad, response is visible in your competitors ad too. Finally, the advertising has become highly competitive and survival requires a lot of patience. 

Positioning yourself with respect to the cost effectiveness is highly challenging, and cost limits need to be sharply defined. When to be aggressive and when to become passive is the key to keep yourself living in the competitive market. Most advertisers who had made PPC, their sales channel are facing sharp decline in their ROI. Entry of bigger players who understands the importance of branding keeps them ahead of those who only calculates immediate sales.

Advertisers who can play bigger game and have long term goals are more likely to win this game rather than those who have limited short term goals. Better advertisers with better goals will eventually eliminate those with inferior goals. Goal setting was always the focus of adwords campaign management and it looks like it would always be. 

Earlier, cheapest click was considered to be the goal. we saw proliferation of bid management tools and techniques. This has become obsolete now. It gave way to conversion based strategy and bid based strategy became inferior. Now, conversion based strategy too has become obsolete, because conversion may not come immediately and concept of conversion needs refinement. If sales was your conversion consider abandoning it. Rather, focus on long term. Improving user interaction on your site might be a better idea. 

Start seeing sale as a function of engagement rather than something which comes instantaneously. Trying to improve this engagement is a better idea rather than just focusing on some immediate outcome. Those who have understood it are only likely to stay longer and those who cannot would surely make an exit now.

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Content Network has now become Display Network - But, It is not mere Change of Name!

Did you notice the Display Network in your reporting and adwords interface. It is the new name for earlier content network. However, it is not just the change of name, and like every other change, google has imposed Ignorance tax with this too. Earlier, content network used to take the default bid of the adgroup in question to decide upon the max CPC of the adgroup, if you don't set the specific bid. However, its new incarnation, display network, will use avg. of all the adgroup's CPC. So, if you were in the habit of setting default bid for the content network, you might see unexpected CPC in your campaign. Most of us used to set up separate content network, and so we all were in the habit of leaving the field blank, so that default bid may be used as content bid. However, now, if you are continuing this practice, display bid won't be the default bid of the adgroup, rather it would be using an average of all your CPC bids. This average includes, in the order of priority:

Individual placement bid
Managed placements bid
Default bid

So, the default bid is the lowest in order, and you should know, it does not equals auto in your adgroup. If you have set up managed placement bid and individual placement bids in your adgroup which with rare exception we set up at higher value would impact the auto bid. Hence, if you were thinking that default bid would be used if you leave the desplay network bid ad blank, you are wrong. If you haven't set it up, you should do it as soon as possible, so that you are not charged in excess of what you wanted.

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When and How to use Position Preference for Keywords in Adwords

Adwords allows you to set Position Preference for Keywords on search. To enable it,

1. Go to Edit campaign setting and check the box for Position Preference.
2. select the keywords where you want to apply the preference and click edit keyword setting.
3. Choose the preference of position against each of the selected keywords.

Position preference is to tell the system what is your most preferred position where you want
the clicks to come from. Situations where you should use it are:

• You have discovered some patterns through observation and arrived at the conclusion you convert more often at some places.
• You find it is useful to show in top 3 and useless to show below them. It is true for some kind of Search queries, Conversions are absorbed by top 3 solts, you shouldn't waste click showing below.
• You find a lot of junk clicks at the top and so want to show at the bottom instead. There are situations at certain times that top 3 and higher up the rank attracts too many junk clicks which makes your ROI negative. You may do the turnaround by locking position 6-8. clicks get reduced because of minimization of impulsive clicks and people who click are those who have found some attraction in the ad after reading it.
• You consider Slot no 3-4 to be golden. This is the slot which never shows up in the colored bar. all clicks are through people who have well read the ad copy. it has very good balance of visibility and priority.
• You want minimize the clicks to the maximum w/o losing visibility on the first page. Such a situation happens because of off season impact on your business. Opt for 5-6 slot. it is considered the dead zone. People seldom notice them. Those who notice are who discover something great or irresistible in your ad.

What position preference does for you:

• It will show your ad only in the preferred position.
• It won't show your ad out of the preferred slot even if you qualify for higher position. If you choose 5-8 as preference and ad rank qualifies for slot 1, even then you would be showing at no.5. you would also be charged accordingly. However, there are exceptions observed with respect to the upper limit and Google may show your ad Higher up the Preferred Position.
• Your ad won't show if otherwise it does not qualify for the chosen slot. say you have preference for slot 1-3, but your ad rank qualifies for slot 5. In this case your ad won't show at all.

Update: There are many people who complains, failure to see the ad in preferred position. The most likely hypothesis that may be true is Google gives the preferred position to the ad with highest quality score, if there are too many targeting the same slot. Others being forced to show higher outside the preferred position, if their ad rank permits.

Also Read:

1) NetArgument - Online Skills!: Position Preference Failures: When and why it Happens?
2) Position Preference on Google Search - Why, When and How to use it.

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Keyword Bidding Strategy

Adwords Ad rank Formula says,
Ad Rank = Max. CPC Bid x Quality Score. (Higher is Better)
People want high quality score so that they pay minimum to stay at the desired position. Also, most advertisers have propensity to bid as low as possible. However, bidding too low not only limits exposure of your ads, they also deteriorate your Quality Score Value. If your keyword is relevant, higher bid gives you higher ad rank which means higher CTR and hence higher quality score. I had once discussed a formula for arriving at Optimum Max. Bid , which tells you to relate default bid directly to min. bid (interpret now as first page bid.). It still works fine with a minor tweak - In the wake of First Page Bid available, You just don't need to multiply the modal value by 10. It is a good strategy which helps you gain Quality Score, and allows you to actually produce clicks at a Lower CPC, than those who bid low and develop quality score problems and end up paying Higer CPC. Bid High initially and let it fall gradually is a good strategy.

Once you have built up good quality score, you may start gradual decrease of default bid, till you find the best bid which gives you best figure for clicks, CTR, Cost per conversion & conversions. In fact in the long run bid can hardly remain static. Whenever, you find fall in the expected returns just give all your campaigns and adgroups a bit of shake. Increase the bid a little and decrease it below the previous level. This back and forth shake is capable of giving you either equal volume of returns or more at a better cost per conversion. Do you wonder why? , it is because with every increase, most of the time you gain Quality Score, which allows you to bid lower for the same Ad Rank.

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First Page Bid under the shadow of Minimum Bid Ghost

It is a reasonably good time period that has elapsed after the launch of first page bid. Anomaly is that, some bizarre observation are still found with respect to first page bid. Minimum bid which earlier featured into our accounts showed minimum required bid for making the keyword active. Since, active/inactive of the keyword is no more an issue, the question is whether First Page Bid is actually the minimum bid for showing on first page or not. Logically, any keyword falling short of Recommended First Page Bid, should not show on first page, but Even ads diagnostic says showing even when you fall short of this bid. Also, you can manually see them on Search Result Page. Remember, earlier minimum bid shown in the account was sensitive to Landing Page Quality, but ad rank discounted landing page quality and it still does. So, what is this First Page bid. It is nothing but a mere projection of earlier minimum bid, actually nothing to do with First Page itself!

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