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How to Choose a Bidding Strategy in Google Ads
April 23, 2025
8 mins
Choosing the best Google Ads bidding strategy is an eternal question. Experienced professionals understand the difference between manual and automated management, know how CPA and ROAS work, but it doesn't make it any easier. Because each case is unique: audience, budget, competition, seasonality - all of this affects the result. You have to test, analyze, adjust, and test again.
And beginners generally find themselves in a double mess: they first need to understand the terms, learn all types of Google Ads bids, and understand how to set them correctly.
In this Promodo article, we will explain what Google Ads bids are and how to choose the method of bidding depending on the goals of your advertising campaign. To make it interesting for both beginners and experienced marketers, we have chosen different scenarios.
Google Ads Bid is the maximum amount an advertiser is willing to pay for each user interaction with your ad. This can be the cost per:
Bids determine how often and in what positions ads will be displayed in search results, Google resources, and on partner sites. Google Ads bids can be set manually or automatically, depending on the strategy you choose.
Google Ads independently determines which ads to show users. This happens instantly based on the principle of an auction that takes place every time someone searches for information on Google or visits a website where ads are displayed.
The auction analyzes several factors to decide which ads will appear and in which positions. In general, 6 key parameters are taken into account that affect the result of the ad display.
When you set a bid in Google Ads, you set the maximum amount you are willing to pay for a click on your ad. However, the actual amount you pay will usually be lower.
For example, if you set a bid of $10, and the next competitor bids $7, the actual bid may be $7.01. This is because Google Ads uses a second-price auction model: you pay the minimum amount necessary to outbid a competitor.
To show users the most relevant results, Google Ads evaluates factors such as the usefulness of the ad, the relevance of the landing page, and the ease of navigation on it. It is also important that the landing page meets the expectations of users after they click on your ad.
When you create an ad, you can add additional information, such as a phone number, footnotes, or additional links - these additions are called ad objects.
If your keywords, ads, and objects are well aligned with user needs, you can get a better position even for a lower bid than your competitor.
The rating of an ad determines whether it will be included in the Google Ads auction. For this purpose, the ad must meet the minimum requirements.
The rating depends on the quality of the ad, its position, search context, and user characteristics. Ads with low quality or those in the top positions are subject to higher requirements. If there are no competitors in the auction, the advertiser pays the reserve price.
That is, even without competition, your ad may be expensive due to high requirements for rating and quality.
Context is of great importance during the ad auction. To determine relevance, Google Ads takes into account what search queries a person uses, where they are, what device they are searching on (mobile or computer), when they are searching, and what other ads and results are shown on the page.
If two ads have the same rating, they have an equal chance of being displayed. The greater the difference in ratings between two advertisers, the higher the chances of display for the one with the higher bid. However, this advertiser may need to pay more per click.
To summarize, these six factors determine whether and when your ad will be shown to potential customers.
Google Ads offers a variety of bidding strategies to help advertisers achieve their marketing goals.
Here are the main strategies and how to use them:
This strategy automatically sets bids to get as many conversions as possible for a given average price.
Recommendations for use:
Historical conversion data is information collected from previous advertising campaigns that shows the number of conversions, their price, and what parameters were the most effective user actions.
If you don't have historical conversion data, this strategy is not the best one to use at the beginning. Instead, it is better to choose another one, for example, “Maximizing the number of conversions”, which we will discuss below.
The strategy automatically sets bids to get the maximum number of conversions within your budget.
Recommendations for use:
This strategy sets bids to maximize the value of conversions according to a given return on ad spend.
Recommendations for use:
Sets bids to maximize the overall value of conversions within your budget.
Usage Guidelines:
This strategy adjusts your manual bids for clicks that are likely to lead to conversions by increasing or decreasing them.
Recommendations for use:
The strategy automatically sets bids to get as many clicks as possible within your budget.
Recommendations for use:
This strategy allows you to set the maximum CPC for your ads yourself.
Recommendations for use:
The strategy sets bids so that your ad appears on a certain percentage of auctions, in particular on the top positions of the page.
Recommendations for use:
The choice of bidding strategy depends on your business goals, budget, and available performance data. Careful analysis and testing of different strategies will help you determine the best approach for your advertising campaign.
More on Google Ads:
Google Marketing Platform vs Google Ads: Which To Choose for the Promotion of eCommerce?
Google Tag Manager: A Guide for Beginners
PPC Checklist: Ensuring Peak Performance for Your Campaigns
How to Set Up Google Shopping: A Comprehensive Guide
Business Growth with Promodo’s PPC Services
When setting up a Google Ads campaign, you have a choice between manual and automatic bidding when choosing a bid strategy.
Manual bid management is when you decide how much you are willing to pay per click or impression. This gives you full control over the bids for each keyword or ad group.
When to use:
Cons:
Use case: an online store with a limited budget can set higher rates for profitable products or categories, and lower rates for less marginal ones.
Automatic Bid Management is when Google Ads adjusts bids automatically based on campaign goals and user behavior.
When to use:
Cons:
Example of use: an online clothing store seeking to increase sales, at a certain profitability, can use the Targeted Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) strategy. where Google will automatically take into account many signals to attract users who are more likely to buy your products.
You can combine manual and automated strategies in Google Ads to increase the effectiveness of your campaigns. We recommend using manual bidding to collect data first, and then switching to automatic strategies. It's also helpful to use the Evaluation Cost Per Conversion (ECPC) Optimizer, which combines manual management with automatic optimization. But finding the most effective strategy always means a lot of experimentation and analysis of the results.
Take a look at how PPC automation works on practice in our case study:
We have analyzed the types of bidding strategies and how they work. Now let's consider the requests that business owners may have or the tasks that advertisers face.
Choose “Target price per action (CPA)” or “Maximum conversions”.
Choose “Target return on ad spend (ROAS)” or “Maximum conversion value”.
Choose Maximum Clicks.
Choose “Targeted share of impressions”.
Choose either Manual CPC or ECPC Optimizer.
ECPC allows you to automatically increase bids for more profitable clicks while maintaining control over costs.
Choosing the right Google Ads bidding strategy has a direct impact on the effectiveness of your advertising campaign. At the beginning, you may find it easier to work with automatic management, but over time, we recommend that you delve deeper into setting up manual strategies.
It is by testing different approaches and analyzing the results over time that you will be able to choose the best strategy for your business goals.
Journalist at Promodo
For over 4 years, I have been working as a journalist in the communications and marketing industry. I help brands communicate effectively through written content, engage with market experts, and create professional materials on topics related to business and marketing, sharing insights on working with marketing tools.
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