What Is AdWords Rule Based Bidding?

In Google AdWords, you have an option to set up rules to change your campaign automatically based on other triggers or events. This is known as rule-based bidding. There are a number of advanced software programs and tools that have been created that do just that, using advanced statistics. There are a lot of aspects of rule-based bidding to get into, and it can be found under the “Automate” tab in AdWords. To start, it’s a good idea to use some basic, easy rules that will get you going.

One goal of anyone in Google AdWords management should be to spend less on keywords that are not profitable. You know the value of your average conversion, so if a keyword has spent 80 percent of that and not given you a conversion in the last 30 days you can use a rule to automatically lower the bid by 10 percent. That may not make a huge difference, but at least it will slow your spending as you continue to gather results on a keyword that may or may not be profitable. You can adjust the costs and price reduction based on the particulars of your account, but you get the idea.

It’s a good idea to optimize your keywords manually so that you can maximize the profits on each based on your cost per click. The Automate feature is really a backup plan so that if you miss one, it won’t get too far away from you and you’ll be able to reign in some of your risk of overspending. In addition, once you see that the rule has been executed, you can take a closer look and re-evaluate the keyword in question.

Another similar rule that you might be able to lose if you do not have conversion tracking is to use bounce rate or average time on the site instead. These should give you a pretty good idea of how well the keyword is working, especially when you compare them to those statistics for other keywords. Once you get a good feel for what good and bad numbers look like in those particular analytics, you can set up a similar rule to catch overspending and slow it down.

The risk of rule-based bidding is that you take a great thing that can supplement your manual efforts and try to let it take over your efforts instead. There are many decisions that really need to be made by a human mind and not be a computer program, but at least it can help to catch anything you miss and slow down overspending to help keep you on budget.