Google Adwords CPC Tips and Bid Managment

[hfranz]

What is the best option for Bid Managment? Enhanced CPC or Conversion Optimizer?

What should I be looking at in our Account to see where we are throwing money out the window?

My goal is to have more ROI with much less expense.

[flowsimple]

NEGATIVE keywords! Most ignored area in PPC management, and does so much for improving your performance. Continually mining for negative keywords and adding them to your campaigns/groups will save you money on wasted clicks, non-qualified leads, increasing your relevance. It will also indirectly affect your QS with a higher historical CTR. And an improved QS ends up saving you more on your CPC.

[DavidKonigsberg]

In my opinion You should first work on the account structure and create very small tight ad-groups with ads that related perfectly to the keywords then you should make sure negatives are put in correctly then go thru your cost per conv and see which keywords have the best rates and worst and adjust .............

[KeriMorgret]

Pam Lund has a good post on the Blueglass blog about PPC optimization in under 30 minutes a week. It's aimed at helping make sure you don't throw money out the window, even if you don't have a lot of time to work with PPC. Her post is at http://www.blueglass.com/blog/ppc-optimization-in-under-30-minutes-a-week/. Be sure to check out some of her other posts on that blog as well, she's a great writer about PPC.

[john4math]

I agree 100% with EGOL to look at your quality scores.  If your scores are low for particular keywords, but the keywords look like they should be well-targeted, you might want to change your match type for those keywords.  Google has several: broad, modified broad, phrase, and exact.  If a broad match keywords isn't doing that well, you might want to change it to phrase, or exact.  The broad matching might be matching queries that aren't a good fit.  Here's what Google says about their match types.

There are a lot of features and targeting options that Adwords offers that you might not be taking advantage of.  Do you have sitelinks for your search campaigns?  Does it make sense to show ads on Google Image search?  If appropriate for your site, have you tried a remarketing campaign?  Have you tried YouTube advertising?  Do you run display ads with Banners/Rich media ads and text ads?  Have you tried targeting the display network with topics and audiences?  Are there sites and pages you always want to advertise on in the display network?  Most people start with keyword-driven campaigns for search and display, but there's a lot more too it.  Some of our best converting campaigns aren't keyword driven.

In my case, Enhanced CPC never really did any better than regular CPC, and conversion optimizer has consistently shown an improvement over regular CPC bidding.  I've heard other people say that conversion optimizer didn't do much for them.  The only way to know is to try it out and see how it goes and compare it to the history when you were CPC bidding.

[EGOL]

What should I be looking at in our Account to see where we are throwing money out the window?

Focus first on quality score.  If you do not have a QS of at least seven you are burning money.  If you have a seven then you should be working to get higher.

After you have a higher quality score then is the time to work on other things.  Which other things depends upon you products, your competitors and your profit margins.  Hard to tell without detailed study.  Adwords is difficult and bid management is a mathematical game.