Google Ads is one of the most popular and effective digital marketing platforms. With over 90% market share in search advertising, mastering Google Ads is critical for any business looking to reach new customers online.

This guide will provide a comprehensive overview of Google's bidding and targeting strategies and how to optimize them in 2024. We'll cover everything from initial keyword research to setting up your campaigns, leveraging advanced targeting options, and making data-driven bid adjustments.

By the end of this guide, you'll understand the key factors that impact your ad placement and costs, allowing you to bid strategically to maximize your ROI. Whether you're new to Google Ads or looking to take your accounts to the next level, you'll find actionable tips to improve your Google Ads performance.

Keyword Research

Selecting the right keywords to bid on is crucial for a successful Google Ads campaign. You want to identify high-volume keywords that are relevant to your products or services and have high commercial intent. Here are some tips for researching and selecting profitable keywords:

• Use Google's Keyword Planner to generate keyword ideas and get search volume estimates. You can filter suggestions by average monthly searches to find high-volume keywords.

• Analyze your website analytics to see which existing keywords are driving conversions. Consider increasing bids on those terms.

• Use Google Trends to identify seasonal keywords that may be worth bidding on during certain times of the year.

• Look at keywords your competitors are bidding on by analyzing their ads. Useful tools include SEMrush, Ahrefs, and SpyFu.

• Brainstorm variants around your target keywords, like long-tail versions, questions, and comparisons. These may convert better than ultra-competitive short keywords.

• Organize keywords into ad groups around specific product lines, services, or customer intent. This makes optimization easier.

• Only target keywords relevant to your offerings. Irrelevant traffic won’t convert and will waste the budget.

• Avoid broad match; use the phrase or exact match for more control over searches. Broad match risks off-topic impressions.

• Set minimum monthly search volume thresholds for keywords, such as 500, to avoid obscure keywords.

Thorough keyword research takes time but sets your campaigns up for success. Regularly revisit your keyword list to maximize relevance and profitability over time.

Setting Bid Strategies

Google Ads offers several bidding and targeting strategies to help you maximize the effectiveness of your campaigns based on your goals. Choosing the right bidding strategy is crucial to get the most out of your ad spend. Here are some of the most common bidding and targeting strategies to consider:

Manual Bidding

With manual bidding, you set your own maximum cost-per-click (CPC) bids for keywords. This gives you full control over how much you're willing to pay for clicks, but requires more effort to actively manage bids. Manual bidding is best for search campaigns focused on specific keywords. Set higher bids for your most important keywords and lower bids for less important ones.

Enhanced Cost-Per-Click (ECPC)

Enhanced CPC automatically adjusts your manual bids up or down based on each keyword's estimated conversion rate. So if Google sees a keyword getting a high conversion rate, it may raise your bid for that click. This bidding automatically optimizes for conversions within your set budget.

Target Cost-Per-Acquisition (CPA) Bidding

With this strategy, you set a target average CPA and Google will automatically adjust bids to try to get as many conversions as possible at or below that target. This is great for maximizing conversions while controlling costs. You want your target CPA to be lower than your actual return on investment from conversions.

Maximize Clicks Bidding

This option tells Google to automatically set bids with the goal of getting the maximum number of clicks within your daily budget. Use this for campaigns focused on traffic volume over conversions.

Other Options

There are also options like targeting impression share, targeting return on ad spend (ROAS), maximizing conversion value, and more. Test different strategies to see which works best for your goals. The key is choosing a strategy aligned with your KPIs.

Leveraging Audiences

Custom audiences allow you to target users based on their behaviors, interests, and characteristics. This targeting can be used to optimize your bids and improve campaign performance.

Some ways to leverage custom audiences for bidding include:

• Create a high-intent audience - Build an audience of people who have already shown interest in your product/service. Bid higher to target these high-value users.

• Adjust bids by audience value - Offer higher bids to proven high-value visitors or segments compared to new visitors.

• Lower bids for poor performing audience - If certain custom audiences consistently underperform, lower your bids when targeting them.

• Test bid adjustments - Try incremental bid changes for different audiences to find the right balance between volume and conversion value.

• Refine remarketing lists - Make separate remarketing lists based on engagement levels, transaction history, etc and fine-tune bids for each.

• Optimize with Google Analytics data - Import your Google Analytics audience segments into AdWords to leverage that data for better targeting and bids.

Using custom audiences along with bid adjustments gives you the precision to put your ad in front of your best customers. Make sure to keep testing and optimizing based on performance data.

Location Targeting

Location targeting allows you to set different bids for different geographic locations. This enables you to optimize your bidding strategy based on where your clicks, conversions, or sales are highest.

Some tips for location targeting:

• Analyze your analytics to identify your best-performing geographic regions. You may want to set higher bids for locations that convert better.

• If your business has physical locations, you can target by radius around each location. Increase bids near your brick-and-mortar stores.

• For larger businesses, it is important to target countries, regions, or cities individually, as certain areas may have more commercial intent for your products or services.

• Factor in time zones for location targeting. You may want to show ads at different times depending on the geography.

• Leverage Exclusions to avoid showing ads in locations that don't convert or are not relevant. This will save on wasted ad spend.

• Regularly review and optimize your location targets. Geographic performance can shift over time.

Setting the right location bids takes testing and analytics. Start by defining 2-3 core geographic areas, monitor performance, and expand your targeting from there. Location remains a powerful signal for maximizing ad results.

Time Targeting

One way to maximize the effectiveness of Google Ads is to adjust bids based on the time of day or day of the week. This allows you to target users when they are most likely to convert.

For example, you may want to increase bids during normal business hours when users are browsing at work. Or maybe your target audience is more active in the evenings when they are relaxing at home. Lowering bids outside of peak hours can help reduce costs.

When setting up time-based bid adjustments in Google Ads, you can customize schedules for different days of the week. This allows you to account for differences in behavior on weekdays vs weekends.

Some best practices for time targeting include:

• Increase bids during the hours when you typically see more conversions - Look at conversion data and set higher bids during your peak hours.

• Lower bids in the early morning or late night - Most industries see less conversions during these times.

• Consider time zones - Make sure your schedules account for the time zones of your target locations.

• Test on a small scale first - Start with minor adjustments for a single ad group before rolling out site-wide changes.

• Use bid adjustments sparingly - Limit time-based bids to where they can make a significant impact. Don't overcomplicate your account.

Adjusting bids by time of day allows you to maximize traffic when it matters most. Tracking conversion rates will reveal the optimal times to increase or decrease bids for your business.

Device Targeting

Targeting mobile and desktop users is an important Google Ads bidding strategy. You can tailor bids based on the types of devices you want to target. Here are some tips:

• Set separate bids for mobile and desktop. Mobile usage continues to grow globally, so make sure you are not underbidding on mobile traffic. Analyze your analytics to determine if you should bid higher for mobile users.

• Bid higher for desktop users if they convert better. Check your conversion rates by device. If desktop users are more likely to convert, increase desktop bids to get more of that traffic.

• Increase mobile bids if cost-per-click is lower. Average CPC is often lower for mobile. Consider raising mobile bids if it's profitable.

• Bid higher for in-market segments on mobile. Users on mobile devices have stronger buying signals. Bid higher for high-intent users on mobile.

• Limit bids for tablet users if conversions are low. Tablets can convert poorly. You may want to reduce bids for tablets if the data supports it.

• Set bid adjustments at the ad group or campaign level. Leverage bid adjustments to efficiently manage bids by device type.

Checking your analytics and tweaking bids for mobile, desktop, and tablet is key. Optimize for the devices that get you the most conversions and revenue.

Remarketing

Remarketing campaigns allow you to show ads to people who have previously visited your website or engaged with your business in some way. Bidding strategies for remarketing ads focus on setting bids based on the value of bringing previous visitors back to your site.

Some best practices for remarketing bid strategies in 2024 include:

• Set higher bids for visitors who engaged significantly on your site, like those who added items to a shopping cart or spent time on key pages. These visitors have shown interest so you can be more aggressive with bids to bring them back.

• Use dynamic remarketing to show specific products or offers to visitors based on their browsing history. Set higher bids for visitors who viewed high-value products or offers.

• Tailor bids based on how recently someone visited your site. For example, set higher bids for visitors who were on your site within the past few days vs. weeks or months ago.

• Segment remarketing lists are based on pages visited, time on site, actions taken etc. Set higher bids for your most valuable remarketing segments.

• Use remarketing for both Google Search and the Google Display Network. Optimize bids separately for each network.

• Monitor performance and adjust remarketing bids based on conversion value. Increase bids for segments driving conversions, lower for those not converting.

• Set appropriate daily budgets for remarketing campaigns to avoid overspending on visitors who may have already converted.

Remarketing is a powerful way to keep your brand on the top of people's minds and bring valuable visitors back to your site. Focusing on optimized bids for different remarketing segments will help maximize your ROI.

Bid Adjustments

When setting up your Google Ads campaigns, Google will automatically set bids based on the auctions happening for your keywords. However, there are times when you'll want to manually adjust bids up or down. Here are some of the main reasons to consider adjusting bids:

Increase Bids For:

• High performing keywords - If certain keywords are driving a lot of conversions or revenue, you may want to increase bids on these terms to get more traffic and sales. Just make sure the return on ad spend still makes sense.

• Improving rank for important keywords - For your most important keywords that you want to rank highly for, you may consider increasing bids to improve ad position and get more clicks.

• Emerging keywords - New keywords related to your business that are starting to gain search volume could be good ones to increase bids on to gain exposure and traffic.

• Days/times with higher conversion rates - If your analysis shows certain days or times of day see higher conversion rates, increasing bids during those windows could be advantageous.

Decrease Bids For:

• Low performing keywords - Any terms not driving conversions or revenue should have bids decreased or paused entirely to save budget.

• High competition keywords - For super competitive keywords that are driving traffic but not sales, lowering bids can help improve return on ad spend.

• Low search volume keywords - Keywords with very low search volume may not warrant high bids. Consider decreasing bids to $0.10 or less to conserve the budget.

• Geographic targets not performing - If you have certain geographic targets that underperform, decreasing bids in those areas can help shift the budget to better-performing regions.

• Devices with lower conversion rates - If one device type like mobile has lower conversions, decreasing bids for that device could make sense.

Carefully monitoring performance data and frequently adjusting bids is key to maximizing Google Ads results. The ideal bid amount will shift over time, so bid adjustments should be an ongoing optimization practice.

Conclusion

As we have seen in this guide, Google's bidding and targeting strategies in 2024 require a nuanced, data-driven approach in order to maximize ROI. By following this strategic and optimized approach in 2024, you can make the most of your ad spend and achieve your marketing and revenue goals. Testing and iterating on strategies will provide greater insight into what works best for your unique business.