How to optimise PPC bid strategies for eCommerce

What is a bid strategy in PPC?

A PPC bid strategy describes a goal-driven approach to bidding on target keywords or ad placements. With most PPC platforms, you can implement bid strategies that optimise for one of three goals: traffic (clicks), visibility (impressions) or conversions.

You can manually implement bid strategies using campaign data and settings to achieve your goals. This is the most time-consuming approach, but it gives you the greatest control over campaign performance.

Alternatively, most PPC platforms – including Google Ads – include automated bid strategies that self-optimise, using their own data. For example, you can select the ‘maximize conversions’ bid strategy, which uses AI and real-time data to adjust your bids automatically and optimise for conversions.

The convenience of automated bidding isn’t without its downsides, though – namely loss of control over your bid strategy and reduced performance insights.

How to optimise your PPC bid strategy

There are five key steps to optimising your bid strategy to achieve the best performance in your PPC campaigns.

1. Set goals & objectives

Setting clear goals and objectives for each campaign informs key decisions, including which bid strategy to use.

If you want to maximise the visibility of product listings, then use a bid strategy that prioritises impressions. If driving traffic to product pages is more important, then use a bid strategy that optimises for clicks. If you want to maximise product sales from your campaign, then focus on bid strategies that prioritise conversions.

As an eCommerce brand, you should have campaigns with each of these goals (and more) running at any given time. So, it’s important to select the right bid strategy for each campaign and, then, allocate the appropriate amount of budget to each campaign, based on the priority of each goal.

Let’s say you want to outperform last year’s Christmas run by selling more products from PPC campaigns. In October, you might concentrate on building brand/product awareness by dedicating more budget to campaigns bidding on impressions. In November, you might shift more budget to campaigns bidding for clicks to drive more traffic to product pages and trigger remarketing campaigns for the build-up to Christmas. Then, in December, you might dedicate more of your budget to campaigns targeting conversions or return on ad spend (ROAS) to maximise product sales.

2. Choose the right bidding strategy

Setting clear campaign goals broadly tells you what to optimise for with your bid strategy. However, PPC platforms are constantly expanding their selection of automated bid strategies.

You can either set bids manually to retain full control (this is called Manual CPC bidding in Google Ads). Alternatively, you can select from a variety of automated or semi-automated bidding strategies.

So, let’s review the bid strategies currently available in Google Ads for the main three campaign goals: traffic, visibility and conversions.

i) Optimise bids for conversions

Google Ads has a range of automated bid strategies, called Smart Bidding, that use AI and real-time data to optimise for conversions:

• Target cost per action (CPA): Optimise to increase conversions while targeting a specific cost per action (CPA).
• Target return on ad spend (ROAS): Optimise to increase conversion value while targeting a specific return on ad spend (ROAS).
• Maximize conversions: Optimise for conversions while spending your entire budget (instead of targeting a specific CPA).
• Maximize conversion value: Maximise conversion value while spending your entire budget (instead of stopping at a target ROAS).
• Enhanced cost per click (ECPC): Automatically adjust your manual bids to try to maximise conversions – an optional feature you can use with Manual CPC bidding.

As a general rule, use ‘maximize conversions’ and ‘target CPA’ when you want to increase sales/leads and ‘maximize conversion value’ or ‘target ROAS’ to increase profits. Use ECPC as a semi-automated option allowing Google to adjust your manual bids.

ii) Optimise for traffic (clicks)

If you simply want your campaigns to prioritise traffic generation, you have two bidding strategies to choose from:

• Maximize clicks: Set an average daily budget, and the Google Ads system automatically manages your bids to bring you the most clicks possible.
• Manual CPC bidding: Manage your maximum CPC bids yourself. You can set different bids for each ad group in your campaign, or for individual keywords or placements.

Manual CPC bidding is the original, fully manual approach to managing bids in Google Ads – and it gives you 100% control over your bids.

iii) Optimise for visibility (impressions)

You can also optimise your bids to increase visibility and brand awareness with the following bid strategies:

• Target impression share: Automatically sets bids with the goal of showing your ad on the absolute top of the page, on the top of the page, or anywhere on the page of Google search results.
• CPM: With this bid strategy, you’ll pay based on the number of impressions (times your ads are shown) that you receive on YouTube or the Google Display Network.
• tCPM: Set an average for how much you’re willing to pay for every thousand impressions and optimise bids to maximise reach.
• vCPM: This is a manual bidding strategy you can use if your ads are designed to increase awareness, but not necessarily generate clicks or traffic.

The manual vs automated bidding debate still rages in the PPC community. Automated bidding can get quick results and requires less work but you lose control over bids and how your budget is spent. Crucially, you also miss out on a lot of performance data and you never really know how Google is optimising your bids.

If you want more information about bid strategies, refer to this Google Ads Help page.

3. Segment your keywords

Keyword segmentation groups target queries that share certain characteristics: search intent, product categories, product features, brand keywords, related keywords, etc. This helps you create specific campaigns, ads and landing pages for different target audiences.

It also allows you to apply different bid strategies across these campaigns. For example, you could implement bid strategies to maximise visibility or clicks for lower-intent product searches while maximising conversions and/or ROAS for higher-intent queries. You can apply different bid strategies to these campaigns and allocate budgets to prioritise the most important stages of the customer journey.

Keyword segmentation also provides better performance insights for queries, ads and campaigns. You can see which high-intent keywords really drive product sales and identify any underperformers. Crucially, with segmentation helping you to make everything more relevant, you can optimise each campaign, ad group, etc. with greater control – for the specific campaign goal and user intent.

4. Leverage data & analytics

Given how complex the average eCommerce buying cycle is, data visibility and quality count for a lot. As mentioned earlier, this is one of the biggest downsides with automated bid strategies. You know roughly what Google (or whichever platform) is optimising for, but you don’t know how or what’s working.

Automated bidding has its place (more on this later), but you’ll get the best results by leveraging as much data and analytics as possible to manually optimise bids.

Keyword segmentation gets you off to a good start by mapping campaigns throughout the customer journey. Now, you want to delve deeper into campaign data to identify performance patterns you can target and replicate:

• Keywords: Identify the top-performing keywords and keyword groups (segments) achieving each goal.
• Products: Pinpoint the most important products and product categories for each goal: clicks, purchases, profit margin, ROAS, etc.
• Locations: Break down campaign performance by geographic locations to find the most valuable areas to target.
• Demographics: Analyse the demographics of top-performing campaigns to identify who your most valuable PPC leads are.
• Days & times: Identify the days of weeks and times of day each campaign type achieves peak performance.
• Seasonality: Track campaign performance throughout the year to determine how performance varies through the seasons: summer, winter, the Christmas period, etc.
• YoY performance: Track and compare year-on-year (YoY) performance to build a more accurate picture of mean averages and what good years vs bad years (and seasons) really look like.

That gives you an idea of some of the data points and analysis you can run with manual bidding and campaign optimisation. With full data visibility, you can combine performance insights to optimise bids at a granular level – for example, which hours of the day any given product sells in the highest volumes.

Now, you can optimise bids to maximise visibility for top-selling products, during peak demand periods and even target the areas where sales are highest.

Building upon this, you can import third-party data to incorporate contextual insights that tells you the why behind performance data. For example, you can track product sales alongside weather patterns to determine how rainfall, heatwaves and other events impact purchase habits.

Likewise, you can map demand and sales patterns to economic developments and anything else that impacts consumer behaviour.

With enough data, you can use predictive analytics and third-party insights to optimise bids before events even happen. For example, you can automatically increase bids for all products that sell more during heavy rain when the first raindrop is forecast to hit the ground.

Now, you know what really impacts campaign performance and you’re optimising bids to take advantage of opportunities.

5. Testing & experimentation

No matter how much data you have access to, testing and experimentation is the key to truly maximising campaign performance. We’ve covered this in previous blogs and here are a few ideas of what to test and learn from:

• Test different bid strategies for campaign types, goals, etc.
• Test different bidding adjustments (dayparting, audience targeting, etc.)
• Test manual bid strategies vs automated bid strategies
• Test broad match keywords and Dynamic Search Ads (DSAs)
• Balance conversions vs cost-per-acquisition (CPA)
• Test & learn the best targeting options (location, demographics, devices, etc.)
• Test and learn seasonal trends
• Use outcomes from automated bid strategies as the benchmark to beat manual bidding – and work from there
• Revert to automatic bid strategies if performance suddenly tanks – see if Google can recover performance while you figure out what’s going wrong
• Test and experiment creatives and key elements: ad copy, landing pages, CTAs, etc.

Think of automated bid strategies as a crutch for manual bidding. If you don’t have the time/resources to manually optimise bids for every campaign, test automated bid strategies to find the right mix.

Likewise, if you’re struggling to find the right bid strategy for a campaign, test the automated bid strategy that best matches your goal to see what traction it can build.

How Vertical Leap can refine your eCommerce PPC bidding strategy

We offer a complete eCommerce PPC service for some of the biggest retailers in the UK and beyond. A key part of this service is implementing and optimising bid strategies across multiple PPC platforms to maximise sales and profits everywhere.

Here’s a quick summary of the first steps we take:

• Identify the best PPC platforms for your brand (Google Ads, Amazon Ads, etc.)
• Optimise your product feeds for each PPC platform
• Structure your PPC accounts with campaigns and ad groups for key goals and objectives
• Implement a PPC analytics and reporting system
• Determine the right bid strategy for each campaign
• Analyse performance and refine bid strategies
• Incorporate third-party data and predictive analytics for advanced optimisation
• Automate bid adjustments to maximise ROAS at all times
• Test and optimise campaigns to maximise performance

Find the best bid strategy for your eCommerce PPC campaigns

Implementing the right bid strategy across campaigns is one of the most important drivers of PPC performance. If you need help selecting and optimising the perfect bid strategies for your campaigns across Google Ads, Amazon, Meta and other platforms, our eCommerce PPC team can help.

Call us on 023 9283 0281 or send us your details and a member of our team will get back to you.