Best Practices
Bidding
bid insights.
- Bid strength: An assessment of the competitiveness of your max CPT bid.
- Suggested bid range: The suggested range for where your max CPT bid should fall to increase the likelihood of your ad displaying. The range is based on your bid history, your tap-through rate, and other advertisers’ bid histories for it.
Below, you can see bid strength indicators and suggested bid ranges for an example app called TripTrek that offers travel tracking and sharing.
Use our bid
recommendations.
On the Recommendations page, you may find suggested adjustments for your max CPT bids. For added context, additional metrics such as average CPT and tap-through rate appear alongside each recommendation. Remember that your max CPT bid is the most you’ll ever pay for a tap — many times you’ll pay less. Applying our max CPT bid recommendations can help give your ad a better chance of showing in search results.
Set max CPT bids
based
on match type.
Apply more aggressive bid amounts on exact match keywords, as they’re your core performance drivers and the most relevant to your app. More investment provides you with more control over when your ad appears.
Generally, more moderate bids should be placed on broad match keywords and Search Match ad groups. These drive discovery and can help you tap into search trends, peaks, and lower-volume terms, but may not drive high efficiency like exact match terms. For optimal performance, most of your traffic should come from exact match.
Keep broad match and exact match keywords in separate ad groups or campaigns so you can manage bid strategies individually.
You may want to raise your max CPT bid if:
-
You’ve learned from your discovery campaign or ad group that certain terms are performing well. You can add those high performers as keywords in your brand, category, and competitor campaigns or ad groups and test raising your max CPT bid to see if you can get more impressions and downloads.
-
You have a keyword that’s delivering conversions below your target acquisition cost. Consider making incremental increases to your bid on that keyword to see if you can get more downloads within your target. Use our suggested bid range as a guide.
-
You’re not seeing many impressions for popular keywords. If the keywords are relevant to your app, it’s possible that you’re being outbid by other advertisers. Raise your max CPT bid for specific keywords to see if you can improve results. Use our suggested bid range as a guide.
You may want to reevaluate your max CPT bid if:
-
You have a keyword that’s delivering taps, but low conversions at an acquisition cost higher than your target. Adjust your bid to keep acquisition costs down.
Set your budget
for the long term.
Your budget is a lifetime budget. If it’s set low, you run the risk of exhausting it quickly even with moderately set bids. It’s best to set an amount that will keep your campaign running for at least a month or more, then control spending with a daily cap and, potentially, a budget order.
Control your spending with a daily cap.
Here’s how our example app TripTrek sets its daily cap to ensure its budget will last a full 30 days:
Budget: $1200 (U.S.)
Daily cap: $40 (U.S.)
If you find you’re hitting your daily cap every day and meeting your goals, consider increasing the daily cap to get additional impressions and downloads. For help determining daily cap amounts, check the Recommendations page in your account.
your max CPT bids for existing keywords, or add new keywords with more aggressive bids.
To ensure it’s reaching users during peak travel times, our example app TripTrek increases
bids on high-performing brand and category keywords during summer months.
Campaign Structure
Redownloads