Get More Leads and Increase Sales with Automated Bidding Strategies

In today’s digital landscape, driving leads and increasing sales is a top priority for businesses of all sizes. One effective way to achieve these goals is through automated bidding strategies in your paid search campaigns. By leveraging advanced machine learning algorithms, automated bidding can optimise your bids in real-time to maximize conversions while staying within your budget. In this comprehensive guide, we will explore the power of automated bidding and provide actionable insights on generating more leads and increasing sales using these strategies.

Understanding Automated Bidding

Automated bidding is a feature within Google Ads that utilizes machine learning algorithms to automatically adjust your bids based on real-time data. Unlike manual bidding, where you set bids manually, automated bidding takes into account a wide range of factors to determine the optimal bid for your ads. By automating the bidding process, you can save time and effort while maximizing your return on investment (ROI). This allows you more time to concentrate on other important items, such as testing.

The Power of Maximize Conversions Bidding

One of the most popular automated bidding strategies is Maximize Conversions bidding. This strategy is designed to help you get the most conversions possible while staying within your budget. Maximize Conversions bidding leverages historical campaign data to adjust your bids during auctions, ensuring that you are bidding competitively for valuable leads.

When to Use Maximize Conversions Bidding

Maximize Conversions bidding is particularly effective for campaigns where the primary goal is to generate as many conversions as possible. Whether you’re looking to drive newsletter sign-ups, app downloads, product purchases, or leads this bidding strategy can help you achieve your objectives. Additionally, if you have a specific target cost per action (CPA) in mind, you can set a target CPA with Maximize Conversions bidding to ensure that your bids are optimized to meet your desired cost per conversion. As seen below.

Best Practices for Maximize Conversions Bidding

To make the most of Maximize Conversions bidding, it’s important to follow some best practices:

1. Provide Sufficient Data: Maximize Conversions bidding relies on historical campaign data to optimize your bids. Therefore, it’s crucial to ensure that you have enough conversion data for the algorithm to work with. The more data the algorithm has access to, the better it can optimize bids to drive conversions.
2. Allow Sufficient Learning Time: Automated bidding strategies like Maximize Conversions bidding require time to learn and optimize your bids. It’s common for the algorithm to take a week or more to gather enough data and provide meaningful results. Be patient and give the algorithm enough time to gather insights and improve your bidding strategy.
3. Track Conversions Regularly: Tracking conversions is essential to gauge the effectiveness of Maximize Conversions bidding. Regularly monitor your conversion data using Google Ads’ tracking tools and make necessary adjustments to your campaign to ensure effective budget allocation and bidding optimization.
4. Monitor Your Budget: While Maximize Conversions bidding is designed to maximize conversions, it’s important to keep an eye on your budget. This bidding strategy will aim to spend your entire budget to maximize conversions. If you have a strict budget limitation, consider using alternative bidding strategies outlined in this guide to prevent overspending.

Exploring Other Automated Bidding Strategies

While Maximize Conversions bidding is a powerful strategy, it’s worth exploring other automated bidding strategies to find the one that best aligns with your campaign goals and budget. Here are some additional strategies to consider:

Target CPA (tCPA)

We have already touched on Target CPA. Target CPA is an automated bidding strategy that sets bids to help you achieve the most conversions at your target cost per action (CPA). By specifying your desired CPA, Google Ads will automatically adjust your bids to optimize for conversions while maintaining your desired cost efficiency.

This is a good solution for ad campaigns that steady conversions each day. You mustn’t see a sudden drop-off in conversion data when running this strategy. The system will continue to look for the target CPA and will start to bid down to achieve this. This will result in you dropping out of the auctions and therefore you will see fewer clicks.

Maximize Conversion Value

For campaigns where conversion value is more important than the sheer number of conversions, Maximize Conversion Value bidding is a suitable strategy. By setting a target ROAS, you can ensure that your budget is allocated to maximize conversion value while achieving a minimum return on ad spend.

Again this can be great for B2B and full-funnel strategies. However, you need to make sure that you pay close attention to your campaign budgets. The system is designed to spend your budget and will increase CPCs which can lead to overspends.

Target ROAS (tROAS)

Target ROAS is a bidding strategy that focuses on maximizing conversion value at your target return on ad spend (ROAS). By setting a target ROAS, you can optimize your budget to generate the highest possible conversion value while achieving your desired return on investment.

This can be a good strategy for B2B accounts, with multiple lead goals. You assign a value to each lead goal and the Google Ads system will prioritise the goals with the highest value. It is also great for “full-funnel” strategies where you assign a different value to a goal further up the funnel versus those at the bottom.

As with Target CPA is vital that you don’t see a sudden drop in any conversions. The system will start to bid down and you will see fewer overall clicks.

This strategy can be implemented by selecting the TROAS option within the conversion value strategy, as seen below.

Maximize Clicks

If your primary goal is to drive traffic to your website, Maximize Clicks bidding is an effective strategy. This automated bidding strategy optimizes your bids to generate the maximum number of clicks within your budget, helping you increase website traffic and potential leads.

This strategy can be great for accounts that see high levels of conversions that are stable day to day. The thinking is that if clicks go up so do conversions. If you use this strategy when “limited by budget”, the system will look for more clicks at the lowest possible cost and will therefore drive more overall traffic and conversions.

As with Maximize Conversion Value, this strategy will tell the system to spend your budget, so you must play close attention to campaign budgets.

Choosing the Best Bidding Strategy for Your Campaign

Selecting the best bidding strategy for your campaign depends on your specific goals and budget. If your primary objective is to drive conversions, Maximize Conversions bidding is a strong choice. For advertisers focused on maximizing return on ad spend (ROAS), Target ROAS is the ideal strategy. Maximise clicks is effective for driving website traffic which can lead to more overall conversions.

Whatever bidding strategy you use, it is important to remember that the strategy will go into a learning period, which could take several weeks to exit. During this time, it is likely that you will see a decrease in performance. However, once the strategy gets enough data and starts to optimize, performance should recover and exceed past performance. Remember, sometimes you need to go “down” to go “up”. Therefore, it’s also important to test a new strategy. This can be actioned with a simple A/B test within Google Ads. However, remember to leave enough time for the test to run with the learning period.

Conclusion

Automated bidding strategies offer an efficient and effective way to generate more leads and increase sales from your Google Ads strategy. By leveraging advanced machine learning algorithms, you can optimize your bids in real-time to maximize conversions while staying within your budget. Whether you choose Maximize Conversions bidding or explore other automated bidding strategies, remember to provide sufficient data, allow sufficient learning time, and regularly track conversions and budgets. With the right bidding strategy in place, you can drive meaningful results and achieve your campaign goals