Step 8 - Managing AdWords

    Understand budget features and bidding strategies

Most of us doing Paid Search don't have the luxury of an unlimited budget; hence, the maximum daily budget feature is made available.  However, it's important that you understand the implications of setting your maximum daily budget and how this affects your ad impressions (when your ads appear).  More...

  Properly setting your budget

Your first decision will be to select a bidding strategy.  You'll be asked to select either Manual Bidding or Budget Optimizer.  You should select Manual Bidding, a maximum CPC bidding strategy.

 Why not Budget Optimizer?  And how does that even work?  

Let's say that you use Budget Optimizer and establish the limit at $40 / day.   In this case, you will kick back and not have to do any bidding.  Sounds easy, why not go for it?  Let's see...

Budget Optimizer runs a computer program that ensures that your campaign average over time is right around $40 / day.  Sure, you may think that this sounds great because you don't have time to closely monitor your campaign data and you know that you can't afford more than a certain amount each day.   The problem emerges when you could be spending $65 / day but your limit is set at $40.  Another problem arises when your most impactful ads aren't even showing.  More...

   Are you still thinking about using Budget Optimizer?

• Does it know your short and long term business goals?   No.

• Can it determine what kind of ROI you're projecting?   No.  

• Does it know what your business' most profitable keywords are?    No.  

• Does it run your ads evenly for all of the keywords in your list?   Emphatically, NO! 

The program exists and operates simply to spend your advertising dollars as fast as possible according to your restrictions.  More...

    Manual Bidding is absolutely the way to go

So, you've decided to nix that Budget Optimizer thing.   Now you are telling AdBots (the name of the AdWords robot) - "I want you to run my ads in the most profitable spaces and wherever else possible to bring me customers." 

You must maximize your ad campaign's extent of exposure.  In other words, you would theoretically want your ads to run nonstop in the profitable spaces, right?  Of course!  Here's where knowing about budget settings and bidding strategies comes into play.  More...

      Maximum CPC Bidding Strategy

It's time to manually bid for each individual keyword.   This type of bidding is your way of establishing how much you're prepared to pay for each visitor who arrives at your site.  It's the art of setting your maximum Cost-Per-Click (CPC).  

The problem is that your whole campaign contains general and specific keywords (short and long tail).   Whether you like it or not, you need to do research, customization, and fine-tuning for this strategy to work effectively...and it works EXTREMELY WELL when done properly and monitored closely.  More...

     The Bidding Profit Zone

For each business, there's a bidding profit zone that you can tap into - it's when you're able to maximize your ad impressions and make the most of your traffic stream.  

Our testing and research has shown that your business should be in specific ad positions (also called spaces) depending on the type of keywords you're pursuing (short or long tail).  Here's what we've found regarding max. CPC bidding.  More...