Managing the Minimum

3 strategies to help you monitor and react to bid requirements

Remember how you used to daydream in school, only to snap out of it just as you heard the last bit of information that you knew was going to be on the test?

OK, maybe that was just us. But we’re guessing that, along those lines, over the last few months you may have missed a lot of the advice we’ve offered on managing your new minimum bids.

By now, you probably have keywords with minimum bids that can change from time to time—reserve prices that reflect both the value and quality of your keyword. If you weren’t paying attention before, you may find these three strategies helpful for managing your bids.

Know Your Keywords
Pay attention to which bids are changing, and then adjust as needed. For more details, you can read our original blog post, but here are a few basic principles you should follow:

• Learn which keywords work best for your business.
• Invest in the keywords that are working for you.
• Know what you can spend on your keywords.

Watch Your Quality
You may not have much control over the level of competition in your keyword’s marketplace, but you do have control over how relevant your ads and keywords are. Good ad quality can help lower your minimum bid, plus it can also help your ads reach higher ad positions without an increase in cost-per-click. And, of course, people are more likely to click on more relevant ads. Our March 17 post on ad quality and minimum bids touched on four concepts:

• Track your ad quality through the quality index and the Ad Performance Report.
• Write better ads to make your ads more relevant to potential customers.
• Test different versions of your ads using ad optimization, so that the best-performing ads are displayed more often.
• Group relevant keywords together to increase ad group quality scores.

Use the Tools
Without being too obvious, bids that can change are trickier to keep track of than ones that never change. So we’ve created a bunch of tools that can make it easier for you to know what’s going on with your account. In April we wrote about changes to the account interface, which fall into two main categories:

• How do I know when my minimum bids are changing? This information is plastered all over your account, from alerts on your dashboard to status columns on every keyword page.
• What should I do about my bids? We’ve added a number of ways to help you adjust your bids, including quick links from the status columns and bulk bidding tools that can set several bids at once.

We hope this helps you catch up. If only your ninth-grade Biology teacher had been as understanding.

— The Team

Photo courtesy ~romana~ on Flickr.