When Visibility is the Campaign Goal, Which Bidding Strategy Should an Advertiser Choose?

Google Ads offers various bidding strategies for digital advertising campaigns. Each strategy has its advantages and disadvantages. The choice of which bidding strategy you choose comes down to what your marketing goals are.

Typical key performance indicators include impression share, clickthrough rate and conversion rate. These indicators reflect you ad presence, web traffic and activity on your website, respectively. However, you might be more concerned with increasing brand awareness or visibility than building up traffic at this point in your business. You might wonder when visibility is the campaign goal, which bidding strategy should an advertiser choose?

Google Ads offers the automated bidding strategy called Target Impression Share for boosting visibility. This bidding strategy focuses primarily on getting your ads in front of users.

Remember bidding strategy is a next step to become visible, first step is how smartly and perfectly you select your keywords for your campaign which should match the intent of the users. PPCexpo Keyword Planner is an excellent tool used by many professional to get best results for your campaigns.

The Basics of Target Impression Share Bidding

The answer to the question, “When visibility is the campaign goal, which bidding strategy should an advertiser choose?” is the strategy most focused on showing your information to people.

Target Impression Share is a form of Smart Bidding. That means it sets your bid at the time of auction. It bases the bid on whether it thinks winning or losing will help drive your target impression share. You can set this type of bidding strategy for individual campaigns or portfolios of campaigns.

Impression share is the percentage of times you want your ad to show at the top of the page, the absolute top of the page, or anywhere on the page. That means for each search result in which your ad is eligible to show at the position you choose, Google Ads’ AI will try to show it the percentage of times you set.

The way that this increases visibility and brand awareness is by ensuring your ad gets in front of people, whether or not they seem like they might click on it. This strategy can be good for reaching people early in the conversion process or even before they know they want to use your product.

Settings Specific to Target Impression Share Bidding

Target Impression Share bidding strategy is the answer to the question, “When visibility is the campaign goal, which bidding strategy should an advertiser choose?” Therefore, it makes sense that the possible settings it has concern the visibility of your ad.

Placement

The foremost setting you have control over in Target Impression Share is placement. As mentioned earlier, you decide whether you want your ad to show:

• at the top of the page
• the absolute top of the page
• anywhere on the page

You decide this by inputting a percentage for any of these placements.

The percentage is the percentage of times your ad is eligible for a position that you want it shown. Your ad will not always fit the absolute top position. As an easily-understandable example, if your ad is for a coffee shop, it will not be eligible when somebody asks, “Where should I go to buy dog food?” When people search for things like “coffee near me” or “places to get snacks,” then your coffee shop ad might be eligible.

If you put 50% top of the page placement, then you are saying you want your ad in the first few results for 50% of the results in which it is eligible to appear. For absolute top of the page placement, you are saying you want it to be the first result. For anywhere on the page, you simply want it to show up in the results.

Obviously, the higher placements require more expensive bidding. The automated Target Impression Share bidding will not go out of your budget, but if you do not have a large enough budget you might never reach your target share.

Bid Limits

Since Target Impression Share is about visibility rather than actionable items, it is hard to measure your return on investment. The best way to control how much you are willing to pay is by using a Max CPC (cost per click) or a bid limit.

Setting a Max CPC will ensure you do not pay more than you believe a click is worth for ads shown in higher spots. You must be careful when setting this, however. Too low a limit will make it more difficult for Google Ads to reach your target impression share.

Bid Adjustments

Bid adjustments are a tool to bid more or less aggressively based on insights into your target audience. Essentially, you tell Google Ads to increase or lower bids based on certain audience characteristics, like which device they are using.

Since Target Impression Share sets bids at auction-time, it largely ignores bid adjustments. In fact, the only thing you can use bid adjustments for is to tell Google Ads not to show your ads to mobile users. To do so, set a mobile bid adjustment of -100%.

Wrap Up

Visibility is an important aspect to know. It can help build brand awareness and is useful as a precursor to building traffic and converting customers. Visibility is not the easiest campaign goal to drive. Measuring it is usually done by some abstraction of where your ads are placed. The likeliness that someone saw your ad correlates to where on their screen it was placed.

Now you know when visibility is the campaign goal which bidding strategy should an advertiser choose. The answer is Target Impression Share. By putting your ad at or near the top of search results, you can ensure that people are aware that your company exists. You also ensure that the people who know about your company are those searching for related products and services. Bidding to ensure your ad gets placed in front of potential audience members will do wonders for your marketing goals in the long run.