There are 12 main bid strategies in Google Ads and all of them have their unique benefits. Your goal should be to choose the right bid strategy for your crypto Google Ads. Marketing Crypto founders have been, a team of Google Premier Partners for a decade, we have managed over $35 million in paid ads and we have tested all bid strategies extensively to break it down for you what works best to achieve your certain goals. 

As a web3 and crypto focused marketing agency, we understand the strict advertising guidelines and regulations of what Google considers as speculative financial products. Since it is a new industry, policies are constantly changing but there are currently several loopholes to advertise specific sub categories in the space such as metaverses, NFT projects and centralized exchanges. However, most DeFi projects are still restricted from advertising on Google as of Q4 2022.

In order to properly advertise a crypto related service or product, you or the agency you work with must be certified by Google. There are also different advertising policies for various geographical regions since each country has their own restrictions. 

Determine Advertising Goals Before Choosing a Bid Strategy

We love the crypto industry since there is so much innovation with new ideas and services. When collaborating on digital marketing strategies, we always consult with each client separately since there is not a cookie-cutter solution that best fits everyone. If a project is looking to boost investors or to generate new users on a platform, the advertising strategies would be completely different. 

Proper Steps of Setting Up a Web3 or Crypto Google Ads Campaign:

1. Determine the main goal of the advertising campaign 
2. Design your landing pages to have a combination of text, images & call to actions
3. Set up proper tracking to measure the cost per acquisition or cost per result
4. Research competitors and industry data for targeting opportunities
5. Create compelling ads that make an impact and generate attention
6. Decide and implement one of the 12 bid strategies to reach your goal

Google Ads Bid Strategies and Their Relevance to Your Crypto Projects

Let’s examine the 12 Google Ads bidding strategies and their relevance to your project. Depending on your needs and desired goals, you may adopt one or a combination of these strategies. As you optimize the campaigns to be more efficient, we also recommend switching bid strategies where it makes sense only if there is enough data. 

Typically when running a search or display campaign, we start with a maximize clicks or maximize conversions bid strategy. After running the campaign for a few weeks, we usually switch the strategy to target cost per acquisition. We make adjustments to audit the search terms, daily ad spend and conversions to find a good balance to maximize quality and quantity of traffic. Usually, the most effective bid strategy we use is target return on ad spend (target ROAS), but that requires diligent conversion tracking of your goal or button click labeled with a dollar amount of revenue. It is not recommended to start a brand new Google Ads account using a target ROAS or max ROAS bid strategy since Google has no idea which keywords are generating conversions. 

If you want the ultimate marketing approach, consider learning about how crypto SEO can supplement inbound interest in your project.

The 12 Different Bid Strategies and Their Benefits:

• Maximize Clicks

If you’re new to running crypto Google Ads campaigns, you can get started with the maximize clicks bid strategy. This is a simple method to hit your allocated budget and is more focused on traffic quantity and not traffic quality.

Google Ads will automatically bid for you to get as many clicks as possible without exceeding your set maximum budget amount.

Although this strategy maximizes your traffic, it might be unprofitable in reaching your goals. Max CPC should not be your long-term bid strategy.

• Maximize Conversions

Max Conversions is based on historical campaign performance and auction data. Bids in this method are set to capture the most significant number of conversions within your budget but all goals must be recording properly to avoid wasting a lot of money.

It is usually best to start with “maximize clicks” and move into “maximize conversions” after generating at least 10 conversions.

• Target Cost Per Acquisition (tCPA)

CPA is the money you spend to acquire a single customer. This is especially useful when your priority is to track conversions, e.g., sign-ups, App downloads, etc.

This bidding strategy allows you to set the average cost you’re willing to pay per conversion and offers a high chance of efficient lead generation. If you are running a brand new campaign, you don’t know what your CPA needs to be to efficiently spend your advertising budget. For example, if you set a target CPA too high, your average cost per click may be too high and you are not getting enough juice out of the squeeze. If you set a target CPA too low, your ads will not serve at the top of the search results enough for the keywords that are most important.

• Target Return on Ad Spend (tROAS)

tROAS is an acronym for “target return on ad spend” and it’s the average conversion value designated as revenue for a specific conversion action on your site.

“ROAS” focuses on quality rather than quantity. Therefore, it maximizes conversion value instead of the number of conversions. It could also limit your exposure if Google doesn’t have enough conversion data and your ads may not even serve at all if you set the tROAS too high. 

Target return on ad spend is usually our most effective bid strategy for seasoned accounts since different conversions are worth more than others and our main goal is usually maximizing overall revenue for our clients specific allocated budget. This is the easiest way to scale if we know that for every $10,000 we spend on ads, we are generating back $90,000 of revenue for example. Most clients would be willing to spend more on their advertising when we can identify and obtain a satisfactory ROAS. 

• Maximize Conversion Value (MCV)

As mentioned, different conversions have different value and they should be categorized differently. For example, a button click to follow a Discord channel is usually not as important as a potential investor downloading a whitepaper or a user creating an account. If there is not a value attached to each conversion, Google will group all of these together to maximize conversions without weighing the value. This can be exponentially inefficient if you set up goals such as video views or +60 seconds on site. 

Maximize conversion value works similarly to target ROAS (except you don’t have to set a target ROI). With this strategy, Google Ads automatically optimizes your campaigns based on a comprehensive algorithm to maximize the goal conversions that are worth more to your business. 

• Target Impression Share

Targeting ad positions was a lot easier a few years ago when Google displayed average position rankings on a keyword basis. Before, you could compare your average cost per click with the average position and manually make adjustments to outbid your competitors. Since they eliminated the average position metric, advertisers are now forced to evaluate how often their ads are appearing at the top of the search results through the search impression share metric. Adding the columns “search impression share lost due to rank” and “search impression share lost due to budget” will allow you to see limitations. 

The target impression share bid strategy is recommended if visibility is your primary goal. However, it does not take in consideration any historic conversion data so you may not be running as efficient of a campaign since your average cost per clicks could be extremely high trying to compete for the top ad positions for competitive phrases. When utilizing this bid strategy, it is recommended to add many relevant long-tail keywords. 

It’s possible to choose where you want your ads to appear on the target search page location for viewers based on three options:

• Targeting the absolute top of the results page (position 1)
• Targeting the top of the results page (ad positions 1-4)
• Targeting anywhere on the results page (anywhere above or below the organic results)

With this strategy, you can also target a percentage of impression share you desire and can set a maximum cost per click limit for the bids. These two factors can drastically impact how often your ads will serve though if max CPC is set too low, the campaign may get very few impressions.

• Enhanced Cost Per Click (ECPC)

Enhanced CPC is a hybrid strategy that combines both automated and manual bidding. 

The strategy allows you to set your base cost per click (CPC) on an ad group or keyword level, and Google will automatically adjust them for optimized results. 

Some of the key indicators that Google looks at when optimizing enhanced CPC are:

• Time of day.
• Browsing behavior.
• Intent.
• The device being used. 
• Geographic location.

•  Manual Cost Per Click (MCPC) 

If you want the most control over your crypto PPC Google ads cost per clicks or you don’t have conversion goals set up properly, manual keyword bidding may be the best bid strategy to start. As a media buyer for a decade, we set our bids manually for the first 7+ years since we could control exactly where our ads would appear in ad positions for various phrases. Over the past few years, Google is trying to automate more and more to increase the revenue for their parent company Alphabet. We have noticed that campaigns utilizing manual bidding usually are restricted and do not run as efficiently as campaigns utilizing smart bidding. 

When determining how much you should bid for certain keyword phrases, you can refer to the free tool, the Google Keyword Planner. For a more in-depth competitor analysis, we use software’s such as SEMRush.com

• Maximum Cost Per Thousand Impressions (CPM)

The CPM bid strategy is strictly for running display or video campaigns which show your ad on other websites, known as placements. These campaigns are more focused on branding and awareness compared to search campaigns that are more focused on customer actions and conversions. 

Setting a CPM bid strategy tells Google how much you want to pay for your ad to show 1000 times. Typically, we have noticed the average cost per 1000 impressions is usually around $6 – $8 USD. If you set your target CPM too high, your ads will spend too quickly and inefficiently but if you set it too low, the ads will rarely show. 

• Cost Per Thousand Viewable Impressions (vCPM)

Like the CPM bid strategy, cost per 1000 viewable impressions is also great for building awareness but not necessarily for driving the most conversions. The difference between viewable CPM is that you only pay when a user is able to view your display ad on a website in the display network. If a user is on a website and your banner ad is at the very bottom of the page and the user does not scroll “below the fold” then that would not count as a viewable impression.

Viewable CPM also has a manual bidding process that allows you to set your maximum cost on 1,000 viewable impressions. This is typically a bit more expensive than traditional CPM, around $10 – $12 USD since users can always see your ads. 

•  Maximum Cost-Per-View Bidding (CPV)

This bid strategy only applies to YouTube campaigns. In fact, it’s the default bid strategy when you create an ad for YouTube. 

Max CPV lets Google know the maximum you are willing to pay for a video view or interaction with your ad. Typically, we set a max CPV of a new YouTube campaign to around $.12 – $.15 USD. With YouTube Ads, advertisers do not pay anything if a user skips the video before 30 seconds. 

This strategy is also great for branding and having control of how much you are willing to pay for relevant viewers. It is also extremely important to consistently audit exactly which channels your video ads are showing on or else you will not advertise to the most relevant audiences. For example, we have audited over 120 different YouTube campaigns and 90% of advertisers are showing their ads on kids related channels since they did not exclude games and apps from their targeting.

•  Portfolio Bid Strategies (PBS)

A portfolio bid strategy for your crypto Google Ads is an effective way to organize many different campaigns to maximize results as a whole instead of individually for each campaign. The learning process is usually a lot quicker since you will have more data across multiple campaigns. This strategy doesn’t make sense if you are running search campaigns and display campaigns simultaneously since the goals for each are completely different. If you decide to use a portfolio bid strategy, you should have similar target CPA goals across each of your search campaigns or display campaigns. 

Bid Strategy Conclusion 

There is not 1 ultimate bid strategy for your crypto Google Ads to utilize for each campaign and with any advertising, A/B testing is crucial to your success. Most campaigns that we run are focused more on conversions and customer acquisition over branding. If this is the case, we typically start with max conversions, then transition to target CPA after we generate enough data. We make adjustments based on daily ad spend compared to daily budget and search impression share. If the client is measuring multiple goals, then we set specific values for each of these goals and optimize the campaigns with a target return on ad spend strategy to scale efficiently. 

If you’re still on the fence about which bid strategy for your crypto Google Ads will be most efficient for your crypto or web3 business, you can click here to learn how to hire a reliable crypto marketing agency to get your campaigns elaborately built using best practices and intensive research.