Digital Marketing Insider (177): 7-26-24

Hello Digital Marketing Insiders!

We're back with another insightful edition of our newsletter, bringing you the latest and greatest in digital marketing strategies from our in-house experts.

This week, we're excited to highlight an informative new article on our blog. Mike Kedzorski, our Paid Search Manager, offers his expert perspective in his blog post: "Campaign Budgeting & Bidding Strategies: What You Need to Know for Google PPC".

Mike's blog is brimming with valuable insights and practical tips that will revolutionize your approach to Google PPC campaign budgeting and bidding.

Mike dives deep into the world of Google Ads bid strategies, a crucial component for successful paid search campaigns. He reveals how these strategies, when correctly applied, can optimize your budget, maximize your ROI, and significantly boost your campaign's performance.

Whether you're taking your first steps into PPC or you're a seasoned digital marketer, Mike's guide offers actionable strategies and advice that can elevate your Google Ads game. Don't miss this chance to supercharge your PPC efforts and gain a competitive advantage in your market!

Stay connected for more updates, insights, and expert advice to fuel your digital marketing journey. Here's to exploring new frontiers together! 🚀

Campaign Budgeting & Bidding Strategies: What you need to know for Google PPC

When to Use the Right Google Ads Bid Strategies 

The Initial roll out of an exceptional PPC Google Ads account starts by choosing the correct Google ads bid strategies for your business goals and understanding how to correctly budget your campaigns. This is one of the most important elements of a successful foray into paid search, and budget manipulation directly impacts how much ROI from your campaigns you can see. 

With average CPC’s growing a reported 17% in Q1 ‘24 compared to Q1’ 23, it’s more important than ever to pay attention to the details. The best way to do that is to get familiar with the top Google Ads bid strategies and understand when it makes sense to implement them.

Top Google Ads bid strategies and when to correctly apply them 

Not all Google Ads bid strategies are created equal — and the metrics they optimize towards are completely different. Here’s a breakdown of some of the most commonly used bid strategies with recommendations on when and how to use them. 

Manual Cost-Per-Click (CPC)

Conquering Manual CPC is the first obstacle to paid search success. Google’s Algorithmic bidding is a very powerful tool, but can only be 100% effective if trained properly. With Manual CPC, you choose the amount you are willing to pay for each click, and Google will not bid above that value. It is a great way to gain key insights on initial campaigns for future performance optimizations.

It’s very rare (unless we’re inheriting an account that’s a properly structured well-oiled-machine) that we would launch a new campaign with an automated bidding strategy without first testing Manual CPC for initial data. 

Manual with Enhanced CPC (E’CPC)

E’CPC as it’s commonly referred to is the first step into algorithmic bidding. This bid strategy allows you to set a manual bid that you are comfortable with, but gives Google some leeway to bid slightly higher when a customer identified as one more likely to convert enters a query. To opt into E'CPC - simply select the Manual CPC option and check one of the following boxes below. Conversions typically work better for lead generation while Conversion Value is used more in the ecommerce space. The correct tracking is required for either to work properly. 

Max Clicks

Max Clicks is a great bidding strategy for brand awareness plays or if you’re trying to accumulate data in a short amount of time. This strategy tells Google to find and bid on any searches relative to  keywords in your campaign, but to stay within your daily budget. I sparingly use it. Typically it makes the most sense on campaigns that are having a hard time spending at all.  Should you test this bid strategy, I recommend adding a maximum bid, so you don’t churn through your daily budget too quickly. If you don’t add a max bid, cpc’s can sometimes be in the $100-$200 dollar range. 

Maximize Conversions

Maximize Conversions can be a very powerful tool leveraging all your campaign data to get as  many conversions as possible. Typically this is a bid strategy that is only leveraged after completing a successful run with Manual CPC or E’CPC bidding strategies. Max Conversions really only works best on campaigns that have seen 10-20 conversions in the past 30 days. 

Target Impression Share

To read the rest of this article and other great ones like it, go check out our WebMechanix Blog. See you there!

This newsletter is sponsored by WebMechanix, the digital marketing agency that makes you smarter. 💡

Whenever you're ready, there are 3 ways WebMechanix can help you:

1. Free Audit: For qualifying companies, WebMechanix can provide 30 minutes of free consulting around your biggest area of digital marketing opportunity. Options include paid search, paid social, SEO & conversion rate optimization (CRO). To learn more and see if you qualify, apply here.

2. WMXtra: Our newest premium content portal for Digital Marketing Insider subscribers. You'll get instant access to all our exclusive content, strategy guides, trainings and best practices that will not be posted anywhere else. You'll also get direct access to our digital marketing experts, a peer to peer network made up of hundreds of marketers and details on our partner program (more $$ in your pocket). Get instant access here.

3. Promote yourself to 5,000+ marketers by sponsoring this newsletter (limited spots available.) Reply "sponsor" to this email for details.