Introduction to bid strategies

DoubleClick Search (DS) bid strategies optimize your advertising spend. They monitor the performance of keywords and product groups, and adjust bids to achieve the highest number of conversions, the greatest amount of revenue, the best position, or highest number of clicks your campaign budgets allow. Instead of manually setting bids in response to changes in your advertising goals or in the overall advertising landscape, use a DS bid strategy to automate the process.

Express your business needs as bid strategy goals, targets, and constraints

Goals and targets

To set up a bid strategy that meets your specific business needs, you specify one of several types of goals for the strategy:

• Ad position: This goal adjusts bids so that your ads appear in a specific position that you target. It's often used for branding campaigns in which brand exposure is a top priority.
• Number of clicks: This goal finds the optimal bids for driving the most traffic to your site. Note that this bid strategy doesn't take into account the actions that users take once they're on your site. Instead, this bid strategy simply focuses on driving traffic.
• Return on investment (ROI) bid strategies: If you use Floodlight activities or Google Analytics to track activity on your site, you can create bid strategies that find the optimal bids for maximizing the number of conversions or the revenue generated on your site at a targeted cost per action (CPA), effective revenue share (ERS), or return on advertsing spend (ROAS).

  For example, you can create a bid strategy that observes which keywords are effective at leading customers to request a quote for your services. The bid strategy will then adjust bids for these specific keywords to maximize customer requests at the optimal advertising spend.

• Monthly spend bid strategies: If you have a fixed monthly budget—or some money left over from a quarterly budget—and you want to make sure you spend that exact amount on a group of biddable items, create a bid strategy that targets a monthly spend. Instead of adjusting bids to meet a specific CPA, ERS, ROAS, or position target, a monthly-spend bid strategy adjusts bids to spend your budget exactly and evenly each month while maximizing the conversions you specify.

Constraints

In some cases, managing spend in the most efficient manner may conflict with other business needs. For example, a bid strategy may set bids so low that you see a decrease in overall traffic to your site, even though the number of conversions remains steady or increases. Since you may want to maintain overall traffic as well as achieve conversions as efficiently as possible, you can set up the bid strategy so that it never bids below a specific amount. This constraint may be necessary to meet business needs, but at a cost of reducing the efficiency of your bid strategy.

You'll need to specify a minimum bid and maximum bid constraint when you create a bid strategy. You can specify other types of constraints depending on the type of bid strategy you create. But keep in mind, the narrower your constraints, the less efficient the bid strategy can be.

Examples

Here are some examples of using bid strategies to achieve specific business needs: