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Video Transcript: Target CPA in Google Ads Explained

Target CPA Bidding is the holy grail of Google Ads bidding strategies when it comes to bidding on campaigns while you’re generating leads as opposed to generating e-commerce sales. If you’re generating sales or so on advertising spend is a much better method of generating leads, but the Target CPA Bidding when you’re generating leads let’s have a look at what you should and shouldn’t do when using Target CPA Bidding on Google Ads coming up.

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Hey guys, Darren Taylor of the thebigmarketer.com and my job is to teach you all about digital marketing. Now, if that sounds up your street, you should consider subscribing to my channel. In this video, we are discussing Target CPA Bidding, the holy grail of bidding in Google Ads when it comes to lead generation campaigns. If you’re like me and you thought that using manual CPC bidding gave you more control and you can be a bit of a control freak and then also get better results to your campaigns, shifting over to a smart bidding strategy maybe a bit intimidating at first, but in actual fact, it’s proving to provide better results for campaigns.

It uses algorithms and machine learning, of course, it should outperform human. How do you implement Target CPA Bidding strategies on your campaigns? Before you do any Target CPA Bidding strategy changes, the first thing you need to know is, your campaigns need data. If you don’t have enough data, google isn’t going to be able to optimize your campaigns towards a Target CPA successfully. When I say data, I mean a significant volume of conversions going through your Google Ads account in order for it to learn what’s working and what’s not working in terms of generating those leads.

For example, if you’re generating leads in your campaigns at maybe one or two leads a day and your business is happy with that, then a Target CPA Bidding strategy probably isn’t for you. You’re generating enough leads for your business, you’re getting enough of what you need and the volumes are so low that moving to a Target CPA Bidding strategy isn’t going to help you really get more from your campaigns.

If you’re generating in 10, 20, 30, 40 leads per day then in that scenario, Target CPA Bidding is going to help you because that volume means Google has enough data to know what’s working what’s not using all of these data points for the things like devices, time of day, location, all the general optimization factors you look at but then so many more in the background that we don’t get the data from. Google will use that data in order to find the right results for you on every single auction more likely to lead to a better CPA within your Target CPA.

Imagine the search results page for a specific user and if that user fits the parameters and the profile of someone very likely to convert, you could bid more. If someone is less likely to convert, you can bid less and it all depends on your Target CPA that you set. I can already hear some of you saying, if Target CPA is so great, I could set a CPA solo, I can guarantee myself results from Google ads with very low CPAs because I’ve set the bar so low.

However, that’s a bad idea because what will happen is you’ll restrict the campaign too much. If you set your Target CPA at £20 for example, and your general CPA with a manual bidding strategy is around the £50 or £60 mark, that’s too aggressively lowering your Target CPA. Google is going to struggle to match £20 CPA costs because sheer volume of clicks versus the cost per click as well, those two factors are going to mean for Google to even try and get close to that low CPA your volumes are going to drop off a cliff.

If they lower the bids so much that they know they have to do because they have to try and reach that Target CPA threshold, then your campaign is going to stall and is eventually going to die off because you’ve given it too many restrictions. The best thing to do is to give Google plenty of wiggle room to learn and grow and get better and do an evolution not a revolution. In fact, Google often give you tips and pointers on when to use Target CPA Bidding themselves. They don’t even necessarily wait for you to know whether you want to or not.

If you go into Google Ads and look at your recommendations tab, that will give you all the information you need as google collects it in terms of what expected Target CPA Google could potentially get based on the data going through your account. That will be really helpful for you as a starting point when setting up Target CPA Bidding. What I’m going to right now is jump onto my computer and show you guys Target CPA Bidding of how to set it up in Google Ads and what to look for when setting it up as well, see you in a sec.

Hey, guys in this video I’m going to show you some Target CPA Bidding and how to do Target CPA Bidding in Google Ads. The first thing you want to do is select the campaign you want to set up Target CPA Bidding for. As you can see, I’ve selected a campaign here and that will open up this menu and in the menu, you want to head over to settings. So now you’re within settings, you need to go over to bidding which is this option second from the bottom and you click on this option to expand it.

Now, when you’ve expanded it, you’ll see a number of options and you want to change your bidding strategy. So I’m going to click this link to go ahead and do that. It asks you what kind of bidding strategy you want to use. The one you’ve got selected it will be showing already, so you see I’ve got Target impression share as my strategy already selected. This is showing me what my strategy currently is. Now, what I want to do is change my bidding strategy.

I’m going to click this drop-down here and click on conversions. Now I’ve done that, it says you’re focusing on conversions which is exactly what you want. It says based on the selections, this campaigns will use a maximized conversion strategy and instead of doing that, I’m going to set a target cost per action and then you can put your Target CPA bid in here.

This is where you would set your Target your CPA bid in terms of telling Google the maximum amount you’re willing to pay for a conversion. Again, as I mentioned, it’s great for lead generational campaign’s and once you’ve got enough data in order to back up what you’re doing in giving google enough data to make good decisions, it’s the best thing to do. In this campaign in particular because I know the data and I know the conversions we are getting and I want to automate it, I’m going to set the Target CPA at £50.

It will be different for your campaigns, of course, what you will need to do is benchmark your average CPA and see how your campaigns are performing and then use Google Ads algorithm and power in order to align your campaign and push towards the lowest CPA by using this function. One thing I will say to you is, if you set it too low, say for example, I know my average CPA from my manual manage campaign is £50 and I want the Target CPA to replicate that first instance and then start to look at bringing it down over time and getting the data from Google, that’s a good idea.

However, if I were to decide I’m going to really push google and try and get a CPA of the £20, it won’t work because google, first of all, can’t work miracles but in addition to that, you’re giving too many restrictions when you give it too low a CPA so your volumes will decline, the amount of clicks you get will decline, your bidding will go down because Google will think in order to get a CPA that low, I need to lower the bids as well in order to pay next to nothing for my clicks. You won’t take part in as many auctions on the Google search results and your campaign will basically die, so it’s important to give a sensible number in this field.

Once you set to do a Target CPA strategy and you’re Targeting conversions, you want to hit save and that will update your strategy to Target CPA and it will set it at the level you’ve established as well. Another thing to be aware of is if you head over- you’re already in your campaign, so I’m in the campaign at the moment, I’m going to head over to the recommendations tab.

Now, the recommendations tab will give you an understanding of what you can do from a Target CPA Bidding Strategy, now this account, of course, a dead account so it’s not going to give me a very good up-to-date data. What you’ll find in here if you’re running an active and live campaign, you’ll find in here a suggestion with a Target CPA Google thinks it can achieve based on the data it’s already collected.

What I will say to you is definitely head over to the recommendations tab in order to see specifically what Google recommend your Target CPA should be and what you can actually do in recommendations is you can just click one button and enable your bidding strategy to go to the Target CPA Google have decided you could potentially get, so it saves a lot of time.

That’s how you do it really, you change your Target CPA based on your historical data, don’t forget to check the recommendations tab as well to make sure you’re setting your CPA within the recommended amount Google is looking at and that’s it.

If you liked this video, please leave a like below. Let me know in the comments if you are somebody who is experienced with Target CPA Bidding or someone who is just starting to experiment with it. Maybe you’re like me when this first came around and you really wanted control so in the early days of Google Ads, I really wanted to use manual bidding because I had control. Let me know if you’re like me and you’re a bit of a control freak. Apart from that, check out the other content on my channel, don’t forget to subscribe and I’ll see you guys on my next video.