Your search advertising campaign will benefit if you understand bidding, especially if you can’t see your ads when you search for your keywords. If that's the case, don’t just increase your bids. One of the best ways to get to the top is to improve your ad’s click-through rate.
If you’re not already tracking conversions, we recommend using adCenter’s conversion tracker. By tracking your conversions, you’ll be able to better understand which keywords and ads are the most profitable and adjust your bids accordingly.
In Microsoft adCenter, you bid in any of four ways:
- Enter a bid for all keywords.
- Enter separate bids for all Content AdsBeta keywords and all Search Ads keywords.
- Change the bids for individual keywords.
- Estimate the bids needed for each keyword to reach average position.
In addition to bids on keywords, you can place incremental bids
. With incremental bids, you bid an extra amount beyond your keyword bid to target customer location, day of week, time of day, customer age or customer gender. Unlike keyword bids, incremental bids are optional. See
About Incremental Bidding in adCenter Help for more details.
When someone clicks your ad, the actual cost per click is deducted from your campaign budget. The actual cost per click for each keyword varies based on the following:
- Your bid on a keyword. If you are not using incremental bids, your keyword bid is the maximum amount you can be charged for a click.
- Other advertisers' bids for the same keyword. In online advertising, you pay just $.01 more than the next-highest bidder, all other factors being equal. As a result, you could possibly pay less than your bid amount. (Microsoft adCenter does not disclose what other advertisers are bidding.)
- Incremental bids to target customers by time of day, gender or other target criteria. If a customer who matches one or more of your target criteria clicks your ad, you also pay the amount of your corresponding incremental bids.
If you are not using incremental bids, your keyword bid is the maximum amount you can be charged for a click.
- Monitor your keywords closely for positioning and set your reports to run frequently.
- Prioritize the keywords that bring you the most traffic and are most relevant to your products and services.
- Use adCenter’s suggested bids as a guide when you first begin bidding. Review and adjust your results accordingly after one week.
- Bid on individual keywords rather than entering one bid for your entire list—different keywords require different amounts to reach the top.
- Try focusing your budget on specific phrases and keywords. For example, a business in Seattle that offers services to certain areas might use those neighborhood names as keywords.
- Try incremental bidding to help focus on your demographic. You can run a demographic report in adCenter and use adCenter Labs to determine your demographic and then set your bid accordingly.
