Ad Group-Level Simulations with the Bid Simulator

The Bid Simulator tool gives you insight into the advertising results you could get if you used a different maximum CPC bid for your keywords. For example, suppose you have a maximum CPC bid of $1.00 for your keyword, and you wonder what results you'd get with a bid of $1.50 or $0.75. The Bid Simulator shows the clicks, cost, and impressions you would have seen with these other bids over the last seven days. Using insights from this tool, you can make informed decisions about raising and lowering your bids.

We recently launched a new Bid Simulator feature: the ability to view bid simulations across keywords in an ad group at once. With this launch, we hope to give you a faster and easier way of making bidding decisions across keywords in an ad group.

The ad group level bid simulator provides simulations for two types of changes:
1. Applying a single bid to all the keywords in an ad group
2. Updating the ad group default bid (this only impacts those keywords that do not have their own keyword-level CPC bid and use the ad group default bid)

If, like many agencies and advertisers, you manage your bids at the keyword-level, it may be worth taking a look at ad group level bid simulations. You may find, in some cases, that you could have achieved better results with a single ad group default max CPC bid.

Let’s take a closer look at an ad group in which this is the case:



The highlighted row shows that over the last seven days, the ad group received 339 clicks, costing a total of $182.37. Beneath this row, you can see simulations for the potential clicks, cost, and impressions that the ad group could have received had the keywords all used a single max CPC bid.

In this case, if all keywords in the ad group had used a max CPC bid of $0.53, the ad group could have received an additional 49 clicks (for a total of 398) for about the same cost ($182). Thus, if clicks from all keywords in the ad group are equally valuable to your client, it would make sense to set a single bid of $0.53 for all the keywords.

If a few keywords in an ad group are especially profitable for your client, you should manage them separately by assigning keyword-level max CPC bids. In this case, the bid simulator will display simulations for the remaining keywords in the ad group that use the ad group default bid. If you select a new ad group default bid, this bid will apply to all keywords in the ad group for which you haven’t specified a keyword-level max CPC.



For more details on the Bid Simulator, watch the video below or visit the AdWords Help Centre.



Posted by Kelly Blackford, Agency Training Team