Three Bidding Strategies
There are three initial bidding strategies you might consider to bid across all your keywords.
1. Set all listings to your target maximum bid.
Best for: Businesses that want to minimize time spent managing bids.
2. Set individual bids on all your keywords, managing each one relative to the competitive listings around it.
Best for: Businesses that would benefit more from spending a significant amount
3. Pick some keywords to bid higher than your average target bid.
Best for: Businesses that want to compete on specific keywords and/or want to encourage conversion throughout the customers’ buying cycle.
Use with caution: This method requires careful management to avoid over-spending.
XGaming Case Study: Increased Bidding
To achieve the maximum amount of exposure for XGaming’s site (the company’s overriding goal for the makeover), Yahoo! Search Marketing bid up all of XGaming’s search terms into the top three positions to maximize distribution across our partner network. The only exceptions to this were the few cases in which doing so would have exceeded the company’s cost-per-acquisition (CPA) threshold. The result? XGaming’s new bidding strategy doubled the number of impressions.
Action Items
Review your bids and make sure you’re not bidding too high or too low. Decide which bidding strategy works best for you, and put it into action.
Once you have mastered the strategies in this chapter and started to track your campaigns (covered in the next chapter), move on to the Advanced Bidding chapter, where you’ll learn the calculations that will help you fine-tune your bidding strategy.
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