How to Use Google Ads Bid Simulator?

Bidding on keywords isn’t easy to master. You need to take many factors into account, such as your ad performance, current budget, and your goals for your pay-per-click (PPC) advertising campaign. It takes a lot of trial and error to get things right.

With the Google Ads Bid Simulator, you can eliminate some of the struggles, and find a quick route to better fortunes in your PPC campaigns. Let’s find out more.

What is the Google Ads Bid Simulator?

Google Ads Bid Simulator is a tool for PPC advertisers that provides insight into the potential impact various changes will have on the weekly performance of your paid ads. The simulation gives you an idea of what will happen whenever you adjust core aspects of the campaign, such as your daily budget, or your targets for cost-per-acquisition (CPA) or return on advertising spend (ROAS).

For example, let’s say your current max cost-per-click (CPC) bid is set at $1 for the keyword, baby car seat. If you’re curious to see what results you can get if you adjust your bid to either $1.50 or $0.75, you can use Google Ads Bid Simulator to get estimates of the following key metrics:

• Clicks
• Cost
• Impressions
• Conversions
• Conversion Value

Where to Find Google Ads Bid Simulator

When you’re using a Search or Display campaign in Google Ads, you can find Google Ads Bid Simulator by taking the following steps:

1. Sign in to your Google Ads account
2. Select Campaigns, Ad Groups, or Keywords.
3. Select the simulator icon.
   • • If you’re in Campaigns, the icon is in the “Daily budgets” column.
     • If you’re in Ad groups or Keywords, the icon is in the “Default max. CPC” column.

    

4. You can change your bid by selecting a new bid option in the Bid Simulator.

Ad cost is always a concern, regardless of how big your budget is for PPC advertising. You’ll be able to drive better results when you know how to optimize search keywords by intelligently adjusting the Max CPC.

How Does Google Ads Bid Simulator Work?

Google Ads Bid Simulator collects data and analyzes data from ad auctions on the Search Network and the Display Network. During this process, the simulator considers vital factors, including Quality Score, keyword traffic, and competition in the ad auction. With this information, the tool estimates your ad performance relative to the key metrics.

In Google Ads, there are two different types of simulators: Manual CPC bid simulators and Smart Bidding simulators.

Manual CPC Bid Simulators

The regular bid simulators show you how changes to your max. CPC bid may impact core metrics, such as the cost, the number of clicks, impressions, conversions, or conversion value that your ads would have received for a specific keyword or ad group. You can find these simulators on the Ad Groups and Keywords pages:

• Campaign Bid Simulator shows you how changes to your campaign’s bids might affect that campaign’s performance.
• Shopping Campaigns Bid Simulator shows you how certain changes to your bids may impact your product group’s performance.
• Video Campaigns Bid Simulator shows you how changes to your max. CPC may impact your typical weekly video traffic.
• Hotel Campaigns Bid Simulator shows how changes to your max. CPC or max. CPC% bid may impact your hotel group’s recent performance.
• Device Bid Adjustment Simulator shows you how changes to your device bid adjustment might affect your ad performance on different devices.
• Call Bid Adjustment Simulator shows you how changes to your call interaction bid might affect the performance of your call extensions.

Smart Bidding Simulator

This type of Google Ads Bid Simulator works a little differently to the manual options, as artificial intelligence (AI) is in play. Here, you can choose a Smart Bidding simulator based on the specific key metric or goal you hope to accomplish. For example, you may want to increase clicks or conversion value.

• You can use Target CPA simulators on Search, Display, and App campaigns.
• You can use Target ROAS on Search campaigns.
• You can use Maximize Conversions, Maximize Conversion Value, and Maximize Clicks simulators on the Search network.

Using the bid simulators for conversion estimates

If you use conversion tracking in your PPC campaigns, you will be able to use the Google Ads Bid Simulators to get insights into potential conversion rates. The simulators provide conversion estimates depending on your proposed bids. So, if you’re advertising on the Search Network, and have defined conversion values, you can review these estimates to project your conversion rates and values based on different bid amounts.

Benefits of the Google Ads Bid Simulator

According to Google, there are several good reasons for advertisers to use a bid simulator to enhance their PPC campaigns:

1. Holistic view for better projections – You can view your bid changes together, and model potential changes even when your keywords or ad groups might not have enough historical data.
2. Informed bid scaling – You can see what might happen if you increase or reduce all your bids by a specific percentage. For example, you may want to know what will happen if you increase all bids by 10% before you actually take action on such a plan.
3. Budget guidance – campaign-level bid changes can increase traffic significantly. Thankfully, Google Ads will alert you and make bid suggestions, so you have some guidance, and know when to increase your PPC budget — and by how much.
4. Smart bidding models – You can model what will happen if you change all the bids in your campaign to a fixed value. If you choose to apply one of these campaign-wide bid changes, your ad group default bids will adjust to this fixed value, and your keyword-level bids will be erased.

5 Reasons Why Bid simulators May Be Unavailable

Sometimes, your Google Ads account may not have access to the Google Ads Bid Simulator. In this case, you’ll see that the simulator icon is greyed out in your user interface. Here are a few reasons that you have no access to Google Ads Bid Simulator:

1. Not enough data – In order to provide accurate estimates, bid simulators use historical data from the previous seven days. So, if a campaign, ad group, product group, or keyword has only recently been added, there may not be enough data to run the simulator.
2. Shared budget – You can’t use the campaign bid simulator if your campaign uses shared budgets.
3. Max daily budget – If your campaign has reached its daily budget once in the past seven days, or if it is close to doing so, then Google Ads Bid Simulator may not be able to provide any estimates.
4. Running experiments – The simulators won’t work with campaigns that have any running experiments, or experiments that ended within the previous eight days.
5. Item ID attribute – If you have any Shopping campaign product groups that use the Item ID attribute, the simulator will be unavailable.

Why is there a Missing Column Within the Google Ads Bid Simulator?

You may notice some missing columns in the bid simulators. Don’t worry too much about this, as there are good reasons for the following columns to be missing:

1. Clicks and Cost – These two columns will only appear if your campaign met a minimum clicks threshold in the previous seven days.
2. Top of page impressions – This column only appears if Google estimates you will receive at least one top-of-page impression for any of the bids simulated. Also, this column only appears for campaigns on the Search Network.
3. Conversions and Conversion Value – The “Conversions” and “Total Conv. value” columns only appear if you use Google Ads conversion tracking and if your campaign generated the minimum threshold of conversions within the last week.
4. Additional budget/day required – This column will only appear in bid simulators at the campaign level, providing there is enough historical data.

Wrap Up

The Google Ads Bid Simulator is another fine example of the prevalence of AI technology in paid advertising. While it’s always a good idea to keep a tight handle on your PPC accounts, you shouldn’t discount the power that smart technology offers. With some experimentation and practice, you can get comfortable using the simulators, and learn from the valuable insights they provide. Ultimately, this tool can help you make better decisions about your bids, which will save your budget and generate better results across all your campaigns.