What are Flexible Bid Strategies in Google Adwords?

Google created these strategies to help advertisers like us to make more sense of their bidding and spend less time trying to figure out what to do.

Flexible bid strategies automatically set bids to optimize for certain goals across set campaigns, ad groups and keywords. Once you have created a strategy, it will be shared in your Shared Library in Google AdWords. making it accessible from one spot and making performance tracking easier. You can apply the strategy on the campaign, ad group or keyword level from each respective tab.

There are 5 types of flexible bid strategy:

1. Maximize Clicks.
2. Target Search Page Location
3. Target Cost-per-Acquisition.
4. Enhanced Cost-per-click.
5. Target Return on Ad Spend (ROAS).

Let's discuss each of  them in details :

Maximize Clicks

This strategy will focus on increasing clicks while spending a target amount. The target spend amount is essentially the budget you are setting for any campaign/ad group/keyword that is utilizing this strategy. This is separate from the daily budget you will set on the campaign level for a campaign using manual bidding or another bid strategy.

With Maximize Clicks, you are giving Google control to change your bids in order for the areas using this strategy to work to gain you the most clicks.

You should apply this strategy when you want to get the most clicks to your site for your target spend amount.

Target Spend: This is an amount that you set that is applied to any campaign, ad group, or keyword using this strategy.

Target Search Page Location

Want Google to be on the first page of results, or even the top of the page?

The Target Search Page Location option will automatically raise or lower your bids to show your ad at the top of the page or on the first page of the Google search results. This strategy only works for the Google Search Network. Once applied, it will only take a few minutes for your bids to start being changed by Google and can (and will) be updated several times a day. To set the initial bid amount you can do one of two things: you can opt for the automated approach and have Google set the bid and adjust for you, or set the bid yourself and then have Google adjust the bid for you.

This strategy gives you the option to show on the top of the first search results page or anywhere on the first search results page. If you are using the top of first page search results, Google will raise your bid to fit the top-of-page bid estimate. If you utilize the option to show anywhere on the first page, it will use the first page bid adjustment.

Target Cost-per-Acquisition (CPA)

It is similar to optimize for conversions. This option allows you set bids to achieve an average CPA across all ad groups and campaigns using this strategy. With this approach, some conversions may cost more than the target and some may cost less, but overall AdWords will try to keep your cost-per-conversion equal to the target.

There are 2 requirements to apply this strategy:

• You need at least 15 conversions in the last 30 days (the more data you have, the better Google can help to set bid adjustments)
• Your ad group or campaign has received conversions at a similar rate for at least a few days. 

Enhanced Cost-per-click (CPC)

Enhanced CPC helps you bid more effectively to maximize conversions. You can set your own max CPC bids for each keyword, and from here. AdWords will adjust your bids depending on what it believes is the likelihood of the click leading to a conversion. 

Enhanced Cost-per-click (ECPC) will only raise your bid up to 30% and can lower it as much 100%. Google looks at real-time data to make your bids more effective, such as device, browser, location, and time of day when adjusting your bids during each ad auction.

Target Return on Ad Spend (ROAS).

Target Return on Ad Spend uses the conversion value you set when you set up your conversion tracking. If yo haven't set up your conversion value, you can do so in the Tools tab under conversions.

Once this is done, AdWords will set the max CPC bid to maximize your conversion value. At the same time, AdWords will be trying to achieve an average return on Ad Spend that is equal to your target.

That's it from my side...

If you have any queries, feel free to write in comments down below!!

Stay tuned for more digital advertising!!

Thank you....