The guys at Google are very smart, but you do not need me to tell you that. It is an open secret that they go to extreme lengths to influence the decisions you make from the early stages of setting up a campaign, launching it and managing it. Today, I will discuss the business of how Google ‘tricks’ you into increasing bids on keywords and how you should go about making a decision based on your account’s health and age.

For most seasoned account managers, there is a set bid strategy that they follow or have over the years, cultivated. However, there is always the temptation to keep increasing your bids because google keeps telling you its below the first page bid. Most times, you are well off not listening to them because the next day or week, they will be back, asking you to increase it some more. Google stands to gain (a lot) if you increase your bid every time they tell you to do so. I personally have a customized bidding strategy that I use to determine the outcome of my decision. If you are are looking to make a decision to increase your bids or not, these are the first points you should look at:

Use the Basic Stats

If you have no impressions yet, you should not worry about this, however, if you do, take a good look at your impressions, average postion and quality score. If your quality score is above 7 and you have relatively low impressions, you should not worry about increasing your bid. if however, your average position is below 6, you could do a little math to determine if you want to raise your bids. Multiply the suggested bid from Google by 10(highest QS), then your current bid by your current QS, finally use your current average position to gauge the dollar amount you would raise it by, if you determine you have to at all.

Use the Ad Preview Tool

Sometimes, using the preview tool makes it apparent that you do not need to increase bids. It is always a love hate relationship with the Ad Preview tool, but 65% of the time, it works like it is supposed to and saves you from unnecessarily raising your bids.

At the end of the day, it is not a bad thing to increase bids, but the goal of the campaign is to increase conversions and drive down CPAs, it is essential that bids stay low.

By: Kwasi