Are you ready to hand over your PPC (Pay Per Click) to Google? That’s just what Google is asking you to do with their Smart Bidding feature. But first, a quick refresher on Google Ads.
How it Works
Google delivers search results whenever a user comes to the Google search engine looking for answers. While some of the results are organic — meaning the company paid nothing for their brand to appear on the search engine results page (SERP) — some are paid. You’ll notice that the top results are marked as an ad if a company has paid to have their brand appear higher up in the search results.
However, Google doesn’t give just any company the top position on the SERP, because Google’s customer is not the company, but the user who is searching. To have your ad rank on the SERP, you must provide value to the person looking for answers. Google takes your page’s content and the user’s question into consideration and comes up with a Quality Score. The Quality Score and the amount your company is willing to pay to determine who gets the top ad position in any given auction.
Pay Per Click
You’ll need a Google Ads account to set up a campaign. You can select important factors that determine when your ad might appear. For instance, you may want your ad to appear only if someone is nearby your store’s physical location, or during the hours that your business is open.
You can set your budget to maximize your ad spend, including putting limits on it, such as ad spend per day or ad spend per month. As with any ad campaign, you can set a variety of goals, such as return on ad spend (ROAS), or cost per acquisition (CPA).
Google works with your budget and allows you to bid up to a set amount that you’ve specified for your ad campaign. This doesn’t mean that you will always pay the maximum amount that you’ve designated, but rather a penny higher than your competitor. Google then takes the winners of this auction, and factors in the content that the company has available to rank the ads.
How Smart Bidding Impacts Google Ads
Smart bidding allows Google to take your past ad campaigns into account to maximize your results on future campaigns. The idea is that by tracking the success of your past campaigns, Google can step in and help you make decisions about when to show your ad and when not to in order to maximize conversions.
Smart Bidding also offers more signal options than traditional Google Ads. We touched on signals earlier— they are factors that narrow down who is eligible to see your ad and include things like a user’s location, device, or time of day.
Smart Bidding offers additional signals, including the user’s operating system, browser, whether the user is on a remarketing list, language preferences, and others. You can browse the full list here.
Keep in mind that Smart Bidding is very dynamic and allows Google to work very quickly whenever a live auction takes place (which is every time someone does a search where your ad is going to bid to be seen). The more you use Google Ads and Smart Bidding, the better your results will be.
Is it Worth It?
If you’ve had a positive experience with Google Ads in the past and are comfortable allowing Google to help determine which signals will best help your company and ad campaigns, Smart Bidding is worth trying. However, if you’re new to Google Ads, it can be a lot to take in.
If you need help determining all the factors that go into an ad campaign, we’re here for you. Contact us today and we can talk to you about what ad campaigns can best serve your business.
