Google Ads Bidding Optimization Strategies: Stretch Your Budget and Maximize Your ROI

hey everyone Jason here digital marketing consultant and in this advanced Google ad strategy guide we're going to be going through how to dramatically reduce your ad costs by optimizing your beds and leveraging the power of Google's automated bidding strategies make sure you check out the links in the description to a full-blown video on how to get up and running with Google Ads the correct way the first time as well as a in-depth playlist of videos that walks you through how to get all of your tracking codes installed correctly on your site which is going to be vital especially when we get into step number three of this five-step optimization process for your bidding so as we dive into this five-step process there are three keys to success we need to remember and understand in order to make sure that this process works effectively and the first key to success is remembering the goal of this entire optimization process this entire optimization process is designed to help us figure out what is the lowest cost we can pay to get the best quality prospect remember it's not all about just lowering your costs it's also about making sure that we have our messaging dialed into the perfect prospect so just keep that in mind it's really easy to get caught up in all the bells and whistles in there and forget that really at the end of the day all we're doing is connecting our marketing message to the ideal prospect and we want to pay as least as possible to reach that right person we're not just looking to reach any person we want to reach the right person now the second key to success is to understand all these strategies were going over doesn't give you free range to just sit back and relax advertising you always have to have your two hands on the wheel there's never a cruise control when it comes to ads automated bidding does not translate into I don't have to do any work anymore and finally number three which couple is coupled with that is just keep in mind how much you're trusting Google with your money it's very easy to become a passenger and let all of those black box Google algorithms do a lot of the work for you but you do want to stay on top of everything that you're doing to make sure you're making the most of your advertising dollars and the first step to our five-step optimization process is starting off with manual cost per click and the reason we want to do this is we just want to collect some data we to figure out how much is it gonna cost us to bring people to our website now this phase is probably going to be anywhere from a few days up to a week max and essentially here you're testing your keywords you're testing your ads you're testing your targeting and your tech your audience targeting and you're testing your landing pages or sales pages you want to see if you get any results and you want to see how much does it cost for you show up on the first page or how much is it costing to get clicks across the Display Network the point of this week-long process is to just collect data because when we get started we have no idea how much things cost we really don't have any idea how people are going to respond to our ads and our messaging so this is just kind of laying the foundation of here's kind of what works and kind of what doesn't after this first couple days or first week we're going to switch our manual cost per click where we're just paying a set amount for each click that comes to our website this is the most control we're ever going to have over this process and we'll get into why this is so important in step number three when we get into the automated bidding strategies so we're going to stack our strategies here so once we've gone through that week process we have a general idea of how much it costs to be on the first page we know how much it costs per clicks and hopefully we've got a couple of conversions or a couple of sales or at least have an idea of which keywords or audience targeting or websites are gonna give us the best results now what we want to do is we want to prune it a little bit we're gonna take all of those things that we immediately know don't work like if an ad got zero clicks just cut it off right there if a keyword cost way too much money just cut it off right there and that way we're left with about eighty percent of what we started with and now we're going to enable something called enhanced cost per click so with manual CPC what we did is we told Google hey this is the maximum we want to pay we don't want to pay anymore okay Google's goes okay great we're gonna do our best to serve your ad just like that when you enable enhanced CPC all of a sudden you say hey Google I don't want to pay more than this but if you find a person that's more likely to do what I want them to do on my site I'm willing to pay more and if you know a person probably isn't gonna respond to the actions I want them to take on my site I don't want a bid as much and so what this does is you have your baseline of this is how much I want to pay and Google will increase it and decrease it based upon how they think that particular visitor is going to perform on your site and so you'll do this for another couple weeks and we're probably at the four or five week mark in terms of our campaign testing at this point and once you have that enhanced CPC you're going to get a lot of information very quickly on what targeting is working and what advertising is working and how your landing page is performing now if you're seeing some good results meaning you've collected a couple leads or you've gotten some sales maybe they cost way more than you want but at least you have some people who've gone through the entire process of whatever you need them to be if you're doing a commerce you've got a couple sales if you're doing lead generation you have a couple leads on your list it's not really important how much it costs you to get those results as long as you have some because now you know that at least some combination of what you've been doing can work now what you want to do is say ok Google I've got this process I've over the past four or five weeks I've got a couple sales I've got a couple leads I want you to optimize to get more of that result and this is where step number three comes in and that is the automated bidding strategies so when you're in your Google Ads account you're going to see this long laundry list of different types of strategies right we've talked about manual cost per click which is where you start and enhance cost per click where you give them a baseline and they'll go up and down depending upon how they think that visitor is going to perform on your website so now that you have some leads in sales it's time to give Google a little more control and the reason you want to do that do it this way you don't want to just say hey Google go do this right off the bat and we're gonna be talking about cost per action and target return on adspend I'll get into what those two are in a bit but I'm gonna go through this illustrative example of a search dog right like let's say someone's lost in the woods and you have a search party you have a piece of their clothing you say hey hey dog hey canine here's what they smell like let's go find that smell in the forest right the first two steps that's what we've done Google is our search dog we say hey these are the types of people that kind of work let's go find more let's go find them whereas if you don't do those first steps you're asking that poor Kay you're asking Google to say in everyone in the world let's go find some customers right and Google will find them but it's going to be much more expensive whereas with the first two steps we've through it in and we at least told Google go in this direction to find more people a bit of a silly example I know but I think it gets the point across of why you really just view the first month of what you're doing is testing collecting data and now we can turn on cost per action or return on ad spend and so cost per action what this is is it's it's where you define how much you want to pay for the action people you want people to take on your site so if you're doing lead generation you say hey Google I want to pay five dollars every time someone opts into my landing page or fills out my registration form or if you're doing e-commerce you say ok Google I'm willing to pay $30 for someone to go from hitting my site all the way to purchasing something on my site and this is why conversion tracking is so important because Google's gonna crunch all those numbers for you so in the e-commerce example you say I'm willing to pay $30 for a new customer I'm willing to pay $50 for a new customer so now what Google is going to do is you've given Google a little more control over how much you're paying and instead of paying per click or per impression you're gonna pay per result so Google's going to try and optimize your campaign so that it only costs you $30 for every new customer that you get and of course if you have multiple products you're probably going to want to set up multiple campaigns for those products because you may have one product where you're willing to pay $30 and another product where you might only want to pay 10 just depending upon your profit margins or whatever so cost per action is where Google's going to optimize and say every time you get a new lead or a new sale you're gonna pay this amount I think this is the best place to start if you want to be a little more advanced or you've gone through cost per action before and it's already working for you then you can go ahead and try a return on adspend and return on adspend is saying Google I want to make X amount every time I spend money with you so for example a 100 percent return on adspend that would be hey Google every time I spend a dollar I want to make a dollar or if you want a hundred fifty percent return that is hey Google every time I spend a dollar on advertising I want to make at least a dollar fifty back and again this is all upon your tracking that can be done automatically through the Google tag and your Google Analytics because Google's gonna be looking at your average transaction size it's gonna be looking at how much you're spinning it's gonna be doing all that silly math that you used to have to do manually it's gonna do all that math for you and spit out and cost in your campaign that gives you what you want obviously if you say 300 or 400 percent return you want to spend a dollar and make you know four or five back it does have to be reasonable sometimes you're gonna have to start lower and work your way up or with cost per action you're gonna have to start higher and then work your way down and I highly recommend you use these two strategies in conjunction with number strategy number five that we're going to go through in a bit there's a timestamp table of contents so you can come back to this section specifically to really understand how cost per action work and return on adspend work but those are the two automated bidding strategies that are really going to take your ad costs way low and the actions you're looking for very high now the fourth way we can move forward in terms of optimizing our bids is taking a look at some of the intricate details of our targeting specifically the time of day the day of the week the location that we're targeting and the device that's being used so at each level location time and device we can add a bid adjustment higher or lower based upon the results that we're seeing so let's say we go into our campaign and we take a look at the time data and what I recommend for splitting up your time is split it by seven days a week and then for our blocks each day that way you can easily see the days of the week and within a four-hour time period which one is performing the best and then you can add a bid adjustment let's say forks for some random reason Saturday at 2:00 a.m. is working really well well we can actually increase our budget right inside of Google ads and say during this time period I want to pay more because you know that you're more likely to get the action that you want when it comes to location and devices you can do the exact same thing with locations you're going to want to set your location targeting based upon either zip codes neighborhoods you know states or territories and of course everyone does it by countries but what you can do is you go in and see the specific states and zip codes that are performing better and then you can increase your bids or decrease your bids by a percentage so if you decrease something by a hundred percent that means you're not going to bid on it at all and this is very helpful when you're getting two devices so if you're looking at devices and you see Mobile's doing well or desktop or tablets doing well you can adjust the bids and say hey I want to spend fifty percent 100 percent more when it comes to someone on a tablet because for some reason those people on a tablet take the action you want them to take now finally number five and this is what I mentioned with number three that's really good is to start splicing your campaigns so up until this point you've pretty much just started with your manual cost per click and you've been chopping off things that haven't worked and you've been switching up your bidding strategy and you've been adjusting your bids all and adjusting your bids based on time you know location and device well at this point you should be able to go into your campaign and see a keyword an audience a specific location or time of day that seems to be performing way better than everything else and at this point what you want to do is you want to pull that out and we want to create a campaign just for those settings that seem to be doing really really well and the best way to do this is you just duplicate the campaign that you have and then you turn everything off but those settings that are working the best so for example let's say a keyword is performing really really well so what we would do is we duplicate our campaign and we turn off all other targeting except that one key word and then we continue running a campaign with just that keyword and now you can really start dialing in your messaging with that so you make sure that you're actually creating an ad and you might even create a new landing page specifically for that keyword that's performing really well and you guessed it if you're doing cost per action your cost per action is gonna go down or if you're doing return on adspend you're gonna see your return go up because now you're optimizing for this one specific keyword that represents one specific prospect which was key to success number one really dialing in messaging and prospect so I know this was a little advanced and we went through a lot in this make sure you go back through the table of contents in the description to skip around and really see how this whole process stacks on top of each other and within a few months you're gonna be rocking and rolling and enjoying a positive return on adspend or a very healthy cost per action on your site so if you have any questions go ahead and drop them in the comment section below I read and reply to every single one and if you're still watching this video go ahead and hit that like button and subscribe for more digital marketing and advertising tactics and strategies just like the ones covered in this video thank you for watching and as always keep building the business you love [Music] [Applause]

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Views: 21,850

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Keywords: Jason Whaling, JasonWhaling.com, how to bid on google keywords, keyword bidding adwords, bid strategy types, google adwords bidding strategies, google ads bidding strategy, google adwords bidding strategy, google adwords bidding tutorial, google ads bidding process, google adwords bidding explained, google adwords bidding, adwords bidding, google ads bid adjustment, google ads smart bidding, bidding strategies, enhanced cpc, CPC

Id: X0_EMqaBjCI

Length: 14min 16sec (856 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 11 2018