4 Smart Bidding Strategies To Stay Ahead In The Game

The crux of readership frequency depends on how well one applies their search engine optimisation, or SEO. In essence, SEO increases website traffic by having your website placed high on result rankings in search engines.

Looking at Search Engine Marketing (SEM) as a whole, it constitutes marketing tactics such as pay-per-click (PPC) advertisements, that will similarly establish and strengthen your brand visibility. When it comes to optimising these advertisements, 3 significant factors come into play: campaign goals, amount of data available to your ads and keywords and the competitive landscape of your industry or subject matter.

PPC bids are essentially the dollar amount that generates pay per click advertising. The introduction of automation solution has made it much more accessible for advertisers who wish to use the same engine features and regularly review their bid. This, however, does not translate to no management on your part. Whilst automation bidding supports scale, enhances optimisation to meet multiple goals and offers space complex rule set up, they don’t guarantee long term success. Instead, consider equipping these four strategies, along with your automation bidding, to ensure you’re secured even in the long run.

#1 Establish A Schedule

As with all forms of marketing, you need to re-evaluate the effectiveness of your bidding approach. Most would review their bidding in accordance to an artificial schedule of a monthly, quarterly or even yearly basis. However, the best schedule is one that isn’t fixed. Instead, align your schedule according to your business cycles. Take note of your traffic periods, the volatility of your competition, new product launches or even discount sales. These key events are not fixed to a specific time of the month or year. As much as these events adapt to the market, you will need to adjust your bids accordingly as well. By doing so, your budget will be accounted for and you will even have the latest insights on your competition.

#2 Expand Your information Accessibility

The key ingredient to bidding optimisation, one that’s unfortunately underutilised, is to incorporate multiple data sources into your bid rules. Whilst engine-specific tracking solutions are brilliant at optimising, they still have their downside. Their pixels can only track a limited range of information accessible on the net. You are thus not making the best out of the optimisation as you thought you did.

A possible solution you may want to consider is to create metrics within your analytics platform. Import these metrics into your SEM tools, such as a bid management tool or paid search platform and they will then create custom metrics.

Doing so will improve your accessibility to all the digital activities instead of a mere default percentage available.

You may also want to consider complementing these with the traditional, pre-existing KPIs such as ROI and conversions. Data collected by third-parties such as digital marketing agencies are also an option. After all, the more data you have, the better insight you acquire and that doesn’t sound all too bad. The more information you have, the clearer your next step would be.

#3 Don’t Dismiss Potential Users

The issue does not stop at information inaccessibility. In fact, traditional bidding via the conversion approach has a lot more potential that remains underutilised.

Out of the total number of users who enter the conversion path, only a small percentage actually converts. Despite the fact, these users who start a conversion path is highly valuable as it hints at the effectiveness of your keywords.

Don’t dismiss this group of users! These users are your untouched potential. Consider developing rules and optimisation at different stages of the conversation paths to drive conversions. Classify these groups of users according to their value and subsequently, develop and implement strategies to the respective groups.

#4 Build Monetary Reserves With Slight Bid Adjustments

Many businesses see bidding as a way they can drive brand visibility, which will, in turn, return as investments or revenue. However, most of them tend to overlook the prospect of generating savings by reducing bids.

For instance, don’t succumb to the idea that paying more will translate to accumulative benefits. First, study your market, competition and target audience before you put in that extra money. If your market is one that’s niche and caters to a specific target audience, escalated bidding may not give you the incremental gains you seek. If you deem that your brand visibility and overall branding won’t budge, it’s best to use those funds elsewhere.

On that note, if your peak traffic periods is volatile and you’ve realised that your strong competition has now backed you against a wall, it’s best to bid according to your business cycle, as mentioned. Bid down whenever you can to build up your monetary reserves that can be used in a later period, or in other areas of your business.

Conclusion

Bidding strategies are only a small aspect to SEM, seeing as how they only help activate your advertisements. The other aspects include a compelling advertisement message to attract users and encourage engagement. Only then, conversion will happen.

Of course, this is easier said than done. Failing is part and parcel of business management and marketing and unless you’re keen on experiencing the ups and downs, why don’t you leave to the experts? Leave it to the SEO consultants to figure out the best way to optimise your websites. If you wish to learn what it takes to utilise proper SEM, opt for Digital Marketing Courses.