We have previously made a post on 3 simple strategies to optimize your AdWords campaign - Today we want to add to that, and show you some additional tips we utilize to rank 10x quicker in the SERP’s, keeping a steady, consistent CPA in the ever-growing competitive battlefield that is the Google Ads platform.

What’s The Right Bidding Strategy To Get My Campaigns Ranking...Fast!

A battle many of us face when first starting out with Google ads, is what bidding strategy do I use  - “Should I use target impression share so I can rank quickly in the SERPs ?!” - “I know how much I want to pay for a customer, so I’ll use that as my max Target CPA” - 2 - 3 days later you check your account and you’ve had ridiculously expensive clicks utilizing the target impression share method, or your cost per acquisition is well beyond your Target CPA, that or your campaigns didn’t spend at all….

It’s extremely frustrating, but we completely get it, that’s why we wanted to show you how we effectively test and deploy our campaigns into the right bidding strategy from the start. Focusing on the lead acquisition or product purchases? -  Follow these steps:

Start with a manual bidding strategy to collect data - Starting with an automated bidding strategy with no previous Google Ads data such as Target CPA is a big nono. If you want to quickly get to the top of the auction, and get a rough idea of how much you’re going to pay for top-of-the-page clicks, whilst generating traffic to your site quickly - use maximize clicks.

Depending on competition and average search volume, this strategy will get you the most traffic from day 1 - but we recommend starting with the Manual CPC bidding strategy. That way you have slightly more control over how much you’re spending on each click. (Enhanced CPC is also great - but keep a close eye on your account with this one). If you haven’t already, test out the keyword planner, work out the average cost per click & search volume for the keywords that match the types of search queries you want to target and set your manual CPC targets slightly above that threshold. After working out how many clicks it takes to convert, you can adjust your daily spend target, and then ultimately work out how many conversions you’ll generate per day (within your daily spend targets).

My CPA is way above my target, how can I reduce it?

After 100 - 200 conversions utilizing this strategy, Google will either prompt you to switch over to an automated strategy. Now you have a rough idea of your target CPA, you can set it as your target, right? - Well what if the CPA your hitting right now is way beyond what you ideally want it to be? - If you’ve already followed the steps mentioned in our other post you’ll already know about making sure you have your negative keywords in place & utilizing SKAGs so we won’t talk about that.

Here’s a trick you can use to bring down your target CPA before setting it as your automated bidding target….

Ad Scheduling

If you select your campaign, click more under locations and select the Ad Scheduling option. Click the pencil icon and select each day of the week. Now you will have your day-to-day data.

Here is when things get interesting...Depending on your daily CPA you can now begin to optimize your bidding, if you are 100% over target, maybe bring down your bids by 30 - 40%. This won’t stop your campaigns from spending (depending on how harshly you optimize) but will get you those clicks throughout the day that cost less at the least volatile times. Try and gather at least 14 days worth of data before testing this method, and then test again for an additional 14 days with the bidding reductions in place. Just using this tip alone, we have been able to bring down our CPA from $100 down to $30 - $40 per conversion, which ultimately allowed us to generate 3 - 4x our average daily traffic within the same daily spend targets.

Once you’ve utilized these methods for at least 30 - 60 days, you will have a large pool of data available to switch over to a more automated bidding strategy. We love to use Target CPA once we have lots of clean consistent data available. When setting your Target CPA, set your Target $10 - $20 above your ideal CPA, this will allow for some wiggle room which ultimately allows your campaigns to continue spending. Remember to leave your targets & bidding strategy to warm up for at least 14 days when switching over.

After those 14 days, if you are still achieving above your target, reduce your Target CPA by 30% - 50% per week and keep a close eye on your daily spending. You’ll find a sweet spot where your campaigns continue spending and your Target CPA will become consistent. Google’s algorithms are extremely smart, if you follow these methods, the Google odds will be in your favor.

Something to also try is the ad scheduling when you switch over to target CPA. Now that you’re utilizing an automated bidding strategy, Google will play with these tweaks itself, but we can always add to the strategy if done correctly. Note - We wouldn’t recommend adjusting bids beyond 30% when using an automated strategy, but just set minor adjustments to gradually tweak your campaigns to the perfect CPA.

That’s it!

This should allow you to effectively get ranking in the SERPs quickly, and generate you (over time) the target CPA / CPL you are looking for!

We hoped this helped, try it out and leave a comment on how it worked for you.

See you soon,

Team SV ❤️