Smart Bidding Strategies For Lead Generation Success

Smart Bidding Strategies For Lead Generation Success

Selecting the right bid strategy can make or break your lead generation efforts. Understanding bid strategies is important if you want to maximize conversion value while minimizing wasted ad spend. As businesses strive to capture leads effectively, choosing a well-thought-out approach becomes essential.

Bid strategies can be divided into main categories: Manual and Automated. In manual bidding, you set the maximum amount you are willing to pay for each click or impression, allowing precise control but requires constant monitoring. While automated bidding uses algorithms to optimize your bids in real time. Types of automated strategies include Target CPA, where you focus on achieving a specific cost per acquisition, and Maximize Conversions, which aims to get as many conversions as possible with your budget.

Factors to consider when choosing a bid strategy

Choosing the right bid strategy is crucial for lead generation efforts, start by understanding your business goals. Considering your budgets, some strategies may require more financial investment upfront, while others can be cost-effective over time. Audience targeting also plays a significant role in decision-making. Analyzing who you want to reach and where they are most active online, allowing you to select a strategy that aligns with user behaviour.

Which value-based bidding strategy should you choose?

With value-based bidding, Smart Bidding predicts the value of a potential conversion with each auction. If the bid strategy determines that an impression is likely to generate a conversion with high value, it will place a higher bid. And if the bid strategy determines that the impression isn’t likely to generate a high-value conversion, it will place a lower bid.

Bidding to value works in Google Ads. In 2021, around 80% of Alphabet’s $257 billion in revenue came from Google’s advertising channels, including search, shopping, and YouTube, which is a huge ecosystem of people searching for products and information. Bidding strategy options to tell Google how to optimize for value are maximizing conversion value and maximizing conversion value with a target ROAS.

Target ROAS

Using Google Ads Smart Bidding, this bid strategy analyses and uses Google’s AI to predict the value of a potential conversion every time a user searches for products or services you are advertising. Then, Google’s AI adjusts your bids for these searches to maximize your return on them. In practice, this means if the bid strategy determines that a user search is likely to generate a conversion with high value, Target ROAS will bid high on that search. If this bid strategy determines that the search isn’t likely to generate a high-value conversion, it’ll bid low. Google's AI optimizes your bids at auction-time, allowing you to tailor bids for each auction.

When bidding with a target ROAS, your campaign budget should not be limited or capped. Your ROAS target is the lever that manages your spend. With a target ROAS, you are telling Google to optimize for value at the specific target rather than find as much value within a specific budget. So, when your budget is limited, it potentially prevents the system from having the flexibility to find the next conversion at your target.

While setting ROAS targets, use the last 30 days’ return on ad spend as a benchmark. Google's target ROAS recommendations are calculated based on actual ROAS over the last few weeks. The recommendation excludes performance from the last few days to account for conversions that may take more than a day to complete an ad click or interaction.

A small test that uses a campaign experiment, allowing you to compare the performance of value-based bidding against your existing bidding strategy and make data-driven decisions.

In creating one-click experiment from the recommendations page, you may see suggestions on implementing value-based bidding on your Recommendations page to “Bid more efficiently with Maximize conversion value” showing if simulations identify that your account is measuring two or more unique conversion values and likely to benefit from this strategy. While in a custom experiment, there is an option to create a more tailored experiment to test value-based bidding in your campaign. Choosing a campaign that receives sufficient traffic and conversions for generating statistically significant results. Further, configuring the experiment for using value-based bidding, while the original campaign continues to use your existing bidding strategy.

Employing strategies to jumpstart the system, like initially setting a low ROAS target or starting with Maximize conversion value without a ROAS target. If you choose to start with Maximize conversion value without a target, be sure that your budgets are aligned with your daily spend goals.

Final Thoughts 

Selecting the ideal bid strategy involves a careful balance of campaign goals, budget constraints, and data insights. Choosing a strategy that aligns with lead objectives for high volume, businesses can create a more effective and sustainable approach to lead generation. Furthermore, regular performance monitoring and adjustments based on real-time data help keep campaigns on track, enabling efficient budget use and consistent, high-quality lead generation outcomes.