Enhanced CPC: Additional insight to boost your bidding strategy and increase client ROI

Yesterday we announced Enhanced CPC, a new bid management feature for Max CPC campaigns that aims to increase conversions while maintaining or lowering your cost per conversion. As an agency, the bidding strategy that you use for your clients undoubtedly takes into account a wealth of information that's unique to each of their businesses. Enhanced CPC is designed to supplement your existing bidding strategy with insight that Google has into the types of auctions that convert well for your clients.

Each time an ad is eligible to appear, Enhanced CPC predicts the likelihood that the ad will convert and automatically raises or lowers the ad's current Max CPC bid. Whether you manually manage Max CPC bids on your clients' behalf or use an in-house or third party bid management solution, Enhanced CPC can help you increase your client's conversions while decreasing or maintaining their overall cost-per-conversion.

By analyzing the auctions that have converted well for your clients in the past, the AdWords system identifies correlations between these conversions and specific auction characteristics: the user's geographic location, browser, operating system; the time of day that the user was searching; specific content present on a Display Network site; and many additional factors. When Enhanced CPC is enabled, the system calculates a predicted conversion rate based on this historical conversion data and then raises or lowers your Max CPC accordingly. Note that Enhanced CPC may bid up to 30% above your set Max CPC bid if a conversion is likely.

ClearSearch Media, an online media company with a focus on search engine marketing, recently saw success after testing Enhanced CPC with their client BidCactus. As Jon Simmons, founder of ClearSearch Media, explained, "The results of using Enhanced CPC to automatically adjust bids for BidCactus were impressive. We saw a 27% lift in conversions, with a 7.6% decrease in cost per conversion. Conversion rates increased by 16% overall." Paul Langtry, managing director for clearsearchmedia.com, adds, “Enhanced CPC gives us peace of mind. We can rest assured that if there’s an opportunity, we’ll capture it."

Enhanced CPC is easy to enable via a checkbox in the 'Bidding and Budget' section of the Settings tab within your campaign. While you'll need to log into an AdWords account to enable Enhanced CPC, you'll still be able to manage Max CPC bids on behalf of your clients using the API or the AdWords user interface.

Testing the feature is low-risk due to performance checks built into the product. Enhanced CPC initially modifies bids on 50% of traffic, reserving the other 50% of traffic as a control group. Only when results are strong will the product begin modifying bids on a larger percentage of traffic.

To learn more about Enhanced CPC, visit Google Ad Innovations.

Posted by Lisa Coffey, Product Marketing Manager