Recently Google AdWords announced some new features to better optimize the bids of your Google AdWords campaigns. We will give you an overview of the new and already existing bid simulators and explain the new bid estimates that are now available in your AdWords account.
Bid Simulators
Bid simulators provide helpful performance estimates for your AdWords campaigns.
These estimates are based on the historical campaign data of your AdWords account. This distinguishes the bid simulators from the forecasts in the keyword planner, which are not taking historical data into account.
In addition to the two existing bid simulators, two new bid simulators for shopping campaigns and mobile bid adjustments were added:
New Bid Simulators
- Bid Simulator for Shopping Campaigns: Newly you can use the bid simulator for shopping campaigns. Choose the tab Product Groups in your shopping campaign and click on the square symbol in the column “Max. CPC”. In this view you can see the estimates of clicks, impressions and costs for higher or lower bids and you can directly adjust the bids. This feature is also available on the product group subgroup level.
- Bid Simulator for Mobile Bid Adjustments: You can find the bid simulator for mobile bid adjustments in the tab Settings under Devices in the column “Bid adjustments”. Click on the square symbol to open the bid simulator.
Existing Bid Simulators
- Campaign Bid Simulator: With the campaign bid simulator, you can retrieve performance estimates for higher or lower bids for the search and the display network. Click on the tab Campaigns and on the square symbol in the column “Budget”.
After you clicked on this symbol you will get this view:
You can confirm your bid adjustments directly within this interface. The bid simulator can also be applied in the tabs Auto targets, Ad groups and Keywords. Here the square symbol is placed in the column “Max. CPC”. - Target CPA Simulator: The target CPA simulator provides helpful conversion estimates. If you use the conversion optimizer you will find the target CPA simulator in the column “Budget” in the tab Campaigns. If you use flexible bid strategies for the target CPA, you will find the simulator in the Shared library under Bid strategies in the strategy for the target CPA.
Bid Estimates
Until now AdWords provided bid estimates on the keyword level only for the first page and only in the column “Status” when the bid was below the first page bid. Now you can get bid estimates on the keyword level for specific ad positions: For the first page, the top page (above the organic search results) and the first position. To see these estimates you need to modify your columns in the Keywords tab: Choose the columns with these three bid estimates under Attributes.
Do you have questions regarding the AdWords bid simulators or the bid estimates? I will be happy to answer your email.
