Bid strategy
What is a bid strategy?
A bid strategy is the rule your ad account follows when it decides what to pay for an impression or a click. It can be a manual cost per click, or an automated goal: more clicks, more conversions, a target cost per acquisition, a target return on ad spend, a share of impressions. Automated strategies learn from tracked conversions, so the right choice depends on the data the account already holds.
Example
A new service account has €1,200 a month and not one tracked conversion. It starts on maximise clicks with a cap on the cost per click. At €0.80 a click that is 1,500 clicks a month; at a 2% conversion rate, 30 enquiries, or €40 each.
Two months later the account has history and moves to maximise conversions. Once the volume holds and the cost is steady, a target goes on: €40 an enquiry, because the margin carries it. The target then moves in small steps — a large change puts the campaign back into a learning period, and for a few days the numbers swing without meaning anything.
Why it matters for a business
The strategy decides what the money buys. Maximise clicks buys traffic; maximise conversions buys actions; a target return buys revenue, and only makes sense when the site sends a value with every order. Impression share strategies ignore conversions altogether — they hold a position, usually on brand terms, and can spend a budget quickly.
Automation is only as good as its data. For a shop the target comes from the margin; for a service business it comes from the cost per lead the business can afford. When tracking breaks or the season turns, the platform offers seasonality adjustments and data exclusions for the days with bad numbers; both beat moving the target by hand.
What to ask
- Which strategy is running now, and why that one?
- Where does the target come from — our margin, or an industry average?
- Who changes the targets, how often, and what happened after the last change?
- Is the conversion data the automation learns from clean?
- Is there a cap on the cost per click, and why that figure?
We pick the strategy from what the account can actually measure and review it monthly inside Google Ads.