Bid Optimization Best Practices

Adjusting your bids for your display campaign to best meet your return on investment goals is yet another important aspect of effective optimization. If your campaign cost-per-acquisition (CPA) is below your CPA goals, you should raise your bids to increase acquisition volume. By the same token, if your campaign CPA is too high relative to your goals, you should lower your bids until your target CPA is met.

Here are some additional best practices to consider when optimizing bids for display campaigns:

•Adjust your bids across multiple levels: You should adjust your bids at both the ad group and campaign level towards meeting your CPA goals.

 For managed and automatic placements, you should adjust your bids at the site-level, increasing them for sites that have good conversion performance and decreasing them for sites that have weaker conversion performance. You should also set your default ad group level bid to a level that is appropriate for the average performance across all the placements within that ad group.

•Implement demographic bidding: If you know that a particular demographic is responding better to your ads than other demographics, you can take advantage of demographic bidding to ensure that your ads show more frequently to that particular demographic, while still meeting your CPA targets.

•Don't adjust bids too frequently: It is import to avoid adjusting bids too frequently as it can take a while for the effect of your new bid to be fully realized. Making multiple changes at one time also makes it very difficult to attribute success (or failure) to the appropriate changes. Instead of managing bids on your own, you can also use solutions like Conversion Optimizer to manage the day-to-day adjustments of bids towards your CPA goals.