{"id":66241,"date":"2025-02-03T15:41:56","date_gmt":"2025-02-03T15:41:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/peraltafinancing.com\/business\/marketing\/6-common-manual-bidding-mistakes-to-avoid\/"},"modified":"2025-02-03T15:41:56","modified_gmt":"2025-02-03T15:41:56","slug":"6-common-manual-bidding-mistakes-to-avoid","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/?p=66241","title":{"rendered":"6 Common Manual Bidding Mistakes to Avoid"},"content":{"rendered":"


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In September of 2024, Google announced that the enhanced CPC bid strategy would be going away. As of the writing of this post, you can still use ECPC, but it\u2019s getting phased out of most accounts and is slated to be a thing of the past come March of 2025.<\/p>\n

Instead of relying on ECPC, which will soon no longer be an option, you could transform your strategy to align with manual CPC bidding.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been running paid search ads since 2010 and have used every bid strategy under the sun. I have a personal fondness for manual CPC and think that any marketer who uses it for any period of time will become a better practitioner. But on the flip side, I see lots of accounts leveraging Manual CPC but not actually optimizing it the way it should be. Just like everything else in paid search, \u201cset it and forget it\u201d isn\u2019t really a great idea if you want to see results.<\/p>\n

In this post, I\u2019m going to walk through some common mistakes (in no particular order) I see when people use Manual CPC bidding and talk about what your bid management should look like.<\/p>\n

Contents<\/h3>\n
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  1. Not knowing when to use manual CPC bidding<\/a><\/li>\n
  2. Irregular performance reviews<\/a><\/li>\n
  3. Incorrect lookback windows<\/a><\/li>\n
  4. Poor degrees of bid adjustment<\/a><\/li>\n
  5. Not conducting long-term performance reviews<\/a><\/li>\n
  6. Not leveraging all bid modifiers<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Mistakes to avoid when managing manual CPC Google Ads bidding<\/h2>\n

    Here are the top manual CPC bidding mistakes advertisers should be wary of in Google Ads<\/a>.<\/p>\n

    \ud83d\udea8 Is manual bidding the right strategy for your campaigns?<\/strong> Find out with a free, instant account report using our Google Ads Grader<\/a>!<\/p>\n

    1. Not knowing when<\/em> to use manual CPC bidding<\/h3>\n

    With ECPC going away, advertisers will have to choose whether they should now use automated or manual bidding.<\/p>\n

    \"google\"google<\/p>\n

    One of Google\u2019s suggestions is to test out automated smart bidding<\/a>, which is a good idea. If a machine can do a good job for you and save some time, why not leverage it?<\/p>\n

    \"google\"google<\/p>\n

    While the majority of advertisers use automated smart bidding strategies, this post is for those folks who don\u2019t see good results with automated bidding for one reason or another. Maybe you\u2019re just starting a new campaign and don\u2019t have any performance history to go off of. Perhaps you have low conversion volume and Google\u2019s machine learning can never really detect any patterns, or you\u2019re low on budget and need to find a way to keep costs low. These are all examples of times you could try manual CPC bidding in Google Ads<\/a>.<\/p>\n

    No matter the reason, if you are going to be using manual CPC, this post is for you.<\/p>\n

    2. Irregular performance reviews<\/h3>\n

    One of the first problems we see with most accounts using manual CPC is that they don\u2019t have a regular review process. It seems like every once in a while it crosses the manager\u2019s mind to check bids, but sometimes the next review is a week later, other times it\u2019s a month later, then maybe a couple days.<\/p>\n

    Without a regular cadence of reviews, it\u2019s hard to consistently see better performance from your ads.<\/p>\n

    The change history you see below isn\u2019t uncommon when we review a manual CPC campaign.<\/p>\n

    \"google\"google<\/p>\n

    Looking from the bottom up in the left-hand column, changes for this keyword were made twice on February 14th, then only again on July 5th.<\/p>\n

    However, I\u2019m talking about the timing of reviews, not changes. Not every keyword needs a bid change on every review. It could be very well likely that this keyword only needed changing twice in a handful of months.<\/p>\n

    The reason this stands out is due to the degree of changes (which we\u2019ll get to in a little bit). If the CPC was pulled down drastically from $7.19 to $1.31, that tells me that it probably wasn\u2019t performing well for all those months between February and July and that more regular reviews could have helped keep this keyword more profitable.<\/p>\n

    Having a regimented calendar<\/a> of changes makes it more likely you\u2019ll see good performance and makes it easier to follow since it\u2019s already laid out.<\/p>\n

    Here\u2019s an example of a cadence that I like to do:<\/p>\n

    \"google\"google<\/p>\n

    When conducting these reviews, I\u2019m focusing on a few main areas:<\/p>\n

    \"google\"google<\/p>\n

    Let\u2019s start with an example<\/strong> of a weekly review and say my target CPA is $100.<\/p>\n

    Every Monday, I\u2019ll log into an account and look at the keyword performance for the last week. There, I\u2019m looking for the three categories above:<\/p>\n