A good campaign manager should not just accept the price of a click when first reported but seek out the conditions that allowed that price.
When determining how your Google Ads campaign will spend its budget, the most important decision you have to make is what kind of bidding strategy should you employ. Google has offered various options for a “set and forget” approach where it’s bidding algorithms will take care of everything for you except for writing the ads themselves. But does this convenience actually offer savings in the long term?
Consider this: Last year we were handed a small account where the previous campaign manager had set up a campaign using the ‘maximum clicks’ bidding strategy along with a single ad group targeting both the search and display networks.
Rather than optimize the old campaign we opted to rebuild from scratch with the same geographic targeting but with more robust ads and manual bidding. The results were as follows:
After an equal run time and approximately the same amount spent, the manual bid campaign provided nearly 3x better value in terms of cost per click. In other words this manual campaign delivered 700 more clicks with the same budget which equates to $600 saved at 86¢ per click.
If this small campaign which spent just $10 a day can save $600 in a matter of months, think of what this means on a long term scale.