Maximise Click Volume By Lowering Your Bids

Did you know that the majority of Google advertisers bid too high for keywords? Bidding too high for a keyword not only means you are paying an excessive cost per click but it also means that you are getting fewer clicks (and therefore conversions) for your fixed daily budget. This means you have the opportunity to outstrip the competition by paying less for your clicks!

One thing that curiously doesn’t seem to appear often on PPC advice blogs is advice on bid management. Bid management appears to be very passe it seems yet it is still one of the cornerstones of PPC success – the others being the product itself, landing page conversion, good ad copy and relevant keyword reach.

Lowering Your Bids Can Boost Your PPC Performance

To some, the above statement seems obvious and to others, it may sounds ridiculous but it comes down to simple supply & demand theory.

Let’s take the following example, where your daily budget is £100 and, on average, it costs you:

£3/click for position 1

£2/click for position 2

£1/click for position 3

Clearly spending your £100 on position 3 clicks is going to give you 3 times as many clicks as spending it on position 1. Ergo, a lower bid is better. If you think ‘that’s obvious’ then you might want to back up your claim by setting your ad distribution to accelerated and see by what time of day your daily budget is used up.
If you find that you’re spent by lunch, then either your bids are too high or your daily budget is too low. Clearly you could just raise your budget but what if you can’t?

In this instance, lowering your bids will make your budget last longer and, as we’ve seen above, get your more clicks. The bonus reward here is that, in many markets, customers who do bother to click on the lower ranked ads are often ‘higher quality’ and less impulsive. ‘Higher quality’ can mean ‘more likely to convert’ or simply ‘higher value’.

Adwords Editor will allow you to perform advanced bid changes so that you can modify your bids by a percentage so that you can gradually edge towards this ’sweet spot’ of bid management.

Quick Check List

1. Set your ads to accelerated in Campaign / Settings for 1 day.

2. See when your budget is being used up (this can be done precisely using Google Analytics but monitoring your campaign throughout the day will give you a rough estimate).

3. Lower your bids by 10% at a time using advanced bid changes in Adwords Editor

4. Repeat until your daily budget lasts the whole day (on accelerated)!

Disclaimer: Obviously you might want to consider implementing this on some keywords and not others. All campaigns are different and only you can decide what is exactly the best bidding strategy but, frighteningly, this concept seems to be outside the knowledge of most so just being aware of it could give you that competitive edge.

Have you tried this? Feel free to comment with your thoughts…