Google AdWords Now Offering "Bid Ideas"

Feb 12, 2010 at 9:29am ET by Barry Schwartz

The Google AdWords Blog announced a new feature was added to the Opportunities Tab in the AdWords console. The new feature is named “Bid Ideas” and it gives you suggestions on if you should increase or decrease your bids on certain keywords.

Here is a picture:

Google said the bid suggestions are based on the Bid Simulator tool they announced last year.

Here is more from the blog post:

Bid ideas are shown with their estimated cost, impression, and click impact. When you click on a bid idea, you’ll see a graph showing clicks versus cost for a range of bid amounts. The graph will include your keyword’s current bid (marked in gray) and the proposed bid (marked in yellow). If you’re raising a bid, consider whether the extra clicks and impressions are worth the potential added cost. If you’re decreasing a bid, consider whether the saved cost is worth the potential loss of clicks and impressions.

The estimates you see are variations on your past performance over the last 7 days and are not attempts to predict or estimate future performance. Also, traffic patterns are always subject to fluctuation, so keep in mind that your future performance may shift over time. If you have reason to believe that next week’s traffic will be significantly different from the last week, due to seasonal reasons for example, then it’s a good idea to incorporate that information when selecting your bids.

Related Topics: Google: AdWords

About The Author: Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here. For more background information on Barry, see his full bio over here. See more articles by Barry Schwartz

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http://www.alanmitchell.com.au alanmitchell

Hi Barry,

I can see Google’s new ‘bid ideas’ being a useful tool for small businesses looking to maximise click volume. However, since ‘bid ideas’ do not take into account anything after the click, such as conversion, page views, time on site and bounce rate, which are all incredibly important for a return on investment from PPC, Bid Ideasis definately more of a tool to help with maximisation rather than optimisation.

Since the same keyword can perform very differently depending on countless numbers of variables related to your business, I think it’s worth looking at keyword performance yourself, and setting bids in line with your business objectives, rather than letting Google suggest how your keyword bids are managed.

Cheers,
Alan
http://www.adwords-adviser.co.uk AdWords Adviser

You’ve got to admire Google. Yet another tool making suggestions that will probably increase advertisers bid prices and improve Google’s profit margins.

Adrian Key
Editor of the AdWords Adviser, making AdWords more profitable for you.
pmm

Hey Adrian,

I’m Paul McDonald, a product manager for Google AdWords. I just wanted to express that our number one goal for the Opportunities tab is to provide effective optimizations that help advertisers to meet their goals. Advertisers may have a variety of goals including increase traffic, maximizing ROI or reducing their costs. For this reason we are offering both bid raising ideas *and* bid lowering ideas with this launch.

In many cases, as Barry mentioned in his comment, Google’s doesn’t have the types of information about you and your business to provide the ideal set of ideas but given a goal we can come close. We are working on ways of enabling advertisers to provide us with more information to refine the set of ideas we present with the goal of helping advertisers choose bid, budget and keyword ideas that work best for them.