PPC Bid Management Tools to Boost your Google Ads Campaigns

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising has the potential to transform and even create entire businesses. Now, you can reach a global market in seconds and serve ads only to the audience that you want, when you want, where you want. However, creating effective campaigns and managing them can quickly become a headache and a time sink.

Going through every aspect of your campaign to optimize your keywords, ad copy, landing page, and bidding strategy take hours upon hours that most businesses simply don’t have. That’s why PPC bid management tools are such a useful addition to your arsenals.

Through the use of algorithms and automation, the right tool can help you place relevant ads in front of the right target market for the right price. The result is a more productive team, and more profits to show for it. Let’s take a more in-depth look at the promise of PPC bid management tools and how to get the most out of them.

First Things First: Bid Management Goals

The tools you use will not solve the problem of having unclear goals or marketing plans. If you give someone a hammer, but they don’t know what kind of house they want to build, it won’t do much good.

Start by ensuring you have a clear understanding of your advertising goals. There are generally four types of goals that you want to achieve with online ads:

• Increase branding by driving lots of impressions while staying under a target cost-per-thousand (CPM).
• Increase site traffic by driving lots of clicks while staying under a target cost-per-click (CPC).
• Increase leads by driving conversions while staying below a maximum cost-per-action (CPA).
• Increase sales by driving conversions with a positive return-on-investment (ROI).

Of course, ideally, you would continually improve all four of the metrics above. However, especially when starting, you want to focus on one goal as your primary objective for the campaign or ad.

This is because each goal will require a slightly different strategy. What is beneficial for one goal may become an obstacle for another. So get clear on your focused goal before setting up additional tools.

Not All Paid Search Bid Management Tools Are Created Equally

PPC marketing has been around long enough that there are numerous tools on the market. Combine this with the fact that the industry is always evolving, and you have more choices each year. This can quickly become overwhelming.

The worst-case scenario is investing the time and money into a new tool, setting it up, and finding out that it doesn’t provide the right set of features you need. Make sure the tool you select delivers on its promises and is well suited to your business needs.

How to Succeed without a Paid Search Management Suite

Understandably, not all businesses will be ready in terms of time or finances to invest in PPC bid management tools. If you need to proceed without one for now, here are two things to consider first:

• Hire Great Analysts – A great analyst is better than any tool will ever be. Sure, you have programmed computers to play chess better than humans. Still, paid search management has far more variables at stake, and most of these variables are not available to anyone outside of the engineers at Google. An expert in this field is worth their weight in gold and should be the first hire you make after planning to advertise online.
• Technology is an Enhancement, Not a Replacement – There are only so many bid strategies that you will need. Be smart about what strategies you are looking to use, taking time to carefully select the ones that will help you achieve your goals. Don’t wait for technology to do your job, because it will never know all the nuances of your business needs. The great part is that when you are ready, PPC bid management tools will accelerate your growth alongside your analysis, not replace them.

How to Manage Your Campaigns with PPC Bid Management Tools

Once you have a tool like PPC Signal, how do you proceed to manage your campaigns? After all, you don’t have time to monitor every single keyword for every campaign, and managing bids is another challenge altogether.

Even if you have the budget to hire multiple full-time PPC experts, certain tasks are better suited for technology. A tool like PPC Signal has built-in features like bid management, keyword bid optimization, and more to help you save time and money to deliver success in your PPC campaigns.

PPC Signal also has alerts that give you actionable insights and allow you to bid across an array of complex dimensions. It will help you automate and adjust bids depending on the day, device, geo, keyword, and more. This allows your team to find the right mix of bids that increase conversions and reduce your cost-per-click (CPC).

You don’t need to spend hours a day on the tool. Small-time chunks of just 10 or 20 minutes a day can yield excellent improvements in your campaigns. Over time, these add up until you have a smart, well-oiled PPC machine working full time for you that requires little maintenance.

PPC Bid Management Strategies

So you’ve got your tool fired up and ready to go. What next? Here are some strategies through which you can better optimize and scale up your PPC campaigns:

Strategy 1: Understanding CPC Bid and Quality Score

CPC bid and Quality Score are the main factors that determine the position of your ad on SERP.

Ad Rank = CPC Bid × Quality Score + Undisclosed Factors

CPC Bid refers to the maximum bid you designate that you’re willing to pay for a given keyword. This is why it’s so important to get your bids right. Too high, and you’re overpaying for each placement. Too low, and your ads simply won’t be seen or clicked on by searchers.

Quality Score is the grade Google gives your ad, based on a “keyword’s clickthrough rate (CTR) on Google, the relevance of the keyword and ad to the search term, your account’s historical performance, and other relevance factors.”

As you can see, Google takes a multifaceted approach when determining which advertiser will rank higher. Google wants to ensure that your ads and final destinations are relevant to search queries.

If you have the highest bid on “car repair” but your ads or landing page is focused on selling laptops, your campaign won’t be successful. The reason for this is because Google doesn’t want people to cheat the system or to betray the trust of searchers. By ensuring your content is more relevant, and striving for cohesion between your keywords, ad content, and landing page content, you will deliver on user expectations when they click your ad and arrive on your site. As a result, your Quality Score will increase, which, in turn, results in better search results, and higher conversions.

Additionally, you will enjoy better positioning with a better Quality Score and even lower costs. It makes sense when you think about it. Getting a high clickthrough rate (CTR) that leads to a landing page with relevant content communicates that your advertising funnel is of high quality, and Google wants to reward you for it.

Strategy 2: Manual Bid Management

By micromanaging your bids, you can eventually decrease your maximum CPC. However, this approach requires enormous amounts of trial, error, and time. Furthermore, it’s often difficult to determine which keywords have potential by using simple human intuition.

Even the world’s best and most experienced marketers get it wrong on the first try. PPC marketing is about committing to a certain keyword or strategy and letting it run until you have enough feedback to make an informed decision. This is why manual bid management is not as feasible as relying on modern tools and technology.

Strategy 3: Quality Score and Google Ads

Instead of playing a game of manually raising and lowering your maximum bids, use the power of Quality Score. PPC bid management tools like PPC Signal exist for a reason: to help you focus on the “art” of Google Ads while technology handles the complex science. PPC Signal even offers keyword grouping features that promote a better Quality Score to leverage the power of software on multiple fronts.

How PPC Signal Differs from Other Bid Management Tools

What makes PPC Signal unique? Why should you consider it instead of other PPC bid management tools? Here are some unique features and advantages over the competition that you should keep in mind:

Bring the Unseen to the Surface

Thanks to PPC Signal, you can explore the risks and opportunities with ease and can take the necessary actions to keep your campaign progress on the track.

Easy Data Organization

With PPC Signal, you don’t need to worry about managing data of multiple campaigns. It reports data across your ad groups, keywords, and campaigns. This reduces the need for messy data exports to Excel.

Keyword Management

PPC Signal automatically separates your keywords across various dimensions to simplify the data for you. You can see which keywords have the highest impact, and which underperforming ones need attention.

Wrap Up

Whether you are a small startup, a brand with a single product, or a medium-large sized business, PPC marketing is essential going forward. With the right approach, you can put your ads right in front of interested users and buyers.

However, you also face stiff competition because other brands have access to the same online platforms that you do. One way that you can become more competitive is by using PPC bid management tools like PPC Signal.

When you use the best tools, your result will be better, easier, and more profitable. Instead of wasting time and valuable ad spend, you can work smarter by letting PPC Signal automate mundane tasks. That way, you can focus on higher-level business goals for faster growth.