One of the crucial steps to ensure success in online ad campaigns is to track ad performance in recent days. Those who use Google AdWords can make use of AdWords Bid Simulators to check what their ad performance would have been, if the bids had been different. The simulator can prove to be a valuable tool to plan future ad campaigns without having to lurk in the dark.
Understanding Google AdWords simulators
Google AdWords Bid Simulator is a great way to ensure that you estimate what your advertising results would have been in the last 7 days, if you chose to set different bids. The Campaign Bid Simulator helps you to do that as well. In this article, let us try and understand the bid simulators in a better fashion. These simulators help people who want to increase or decrease their bids but are not sure how it is going to affect their performance. In a controlled and safe environment, you can gauge what effect changing bids will have on your web traffic. This is very important for people who have just begun to use Google AdWords and are trying to understand the way it works. It can help people to write better, make business better and eventually rake in more profits.
What exactly do the simulators do?
Google AdWords bid simulators work efficiently in order to help you understand and estimate what the effects of changing bids are going to be. The bid simulators make use of data brought in from the search network in the last 7 days. It also considers information such as quality score and analyzes data from ad auctions. Along with these parameters, it also takes into account keyword traffic and other factors such as your competitors’ bids.
All these data are then crunched and analyzed to reveal where your ad would have found itself and how frequently people would have clicked on it. What you need to understand is, the bid simulators do not tell you how it is going to be in the future but the simulators use the last seven days’ information and tell you how it could have been in the last seven days.
The bid simulators only help you estimate what it could have been and with that information, you can plan for future biddings. If you have reasons to believe that your ad performance will go up or down, then you probably will want to analyze data and then make changes.
Bid simulators and campaign bid simulators
Now, let us take a look at what a bid simulator is and what a campaign bid simulator is. We shall also try and understand the differences between the two.
The bid simulator is a tool that helps you to estimate a number of factors such as conversions, clicks, conversion value, impressions and cost that your ad would have received in the previous 7 days. It estimates what it would have been if you used alternative CPC bid for your ad group or keyword. This tool can be found in the Ad groups and Keywords tabs. Clearly, we must stress again that it does not tell you what your data will look like in the next 7 days. Thus, you must understand that the estimates are for what it could have been in the last 7 days.
The Campaigns Bid Simulator, on the other hand, is a little different. It quite works like the bid simulator but it allows the user to model bid changes and even apply them across their accounts. After doing so, one can take a look at details at each campaign level. This tool can be found in the Campaigns tab. You may also choose to have a ‘Limited by Budget’ status so that you receive budget ideas instead of Campaign Bid Simulator. The budget ideas help you to estimate what you should be bidding instead of going ahead and taking a risk.
Certain issues that one may need to consider before using the simulators
Let us say you would like to know how many conversions your ads might have received if you set different bids. What the simulators do is these tell you exactly this. You must bear in mind that there are sometimes conversion delays. Right now, conversions are reported for a month after the click. The simulators reveal how many conversions would approximately happen in a single day depending on the clicks based on previous seven days. The sparse conversion data also makes calculating a little difficult. However, if you have a long history, it becomes easier for the tool to estimate your data. If you make major changes to your Conversion Tracking code, the simulator will not be able to estimate at all. In fact, the estimates are invalid if you make major changes in 2 weeks before employing the simulators. As a lot of factors like actions that customers may do when they visit your website are taken into consideration, estimates may not be very reliable. One cannot only depend on data revealed through ad clicks.
Advantages of using the bid simulator
There are several advantages of using the campaign bid simulator. It helps you to take a look at the bid changes. As bid scaling is right there, one can also observe what is going to happen if all the bids are increased or decreased by a certain percentage. Campaign bid alterations can significantly ameliorate traffic. Thus, these emulators will let you know if you should be increasing your budget and what the consequences are going to be. Data can be downloaded and analyzed separately. This tool can be a boon to not only SEO professionals but also marketing and campaign managers who need to know what is going on in their ad campaigns.
Problems with the simulators
There are certain conditions in which you may not see a bid simulation. If there isn’t enough data, you may not see a proper simulation or worse, no simulation at all. As previously mentioned, the simulators use 7 days worth of data. If there is not enough data in the previous 7 days or if enough clicks were not received, estimates may not be available. Also, if a new ad group or campaign is added, one will have to wait for a while before simulators are able to provide estimates. Next, there are times when a certain campaign may reach its daily budget limits. In such a case, the simulators will not provide estimates that you want. If you use automatic CPC bidding, you will not be able to use the simulator properly. Similarly, the Conversion Optimizer also does not go well with the simulator.
More about campaigns
It is very important to ensure that you have a good ad campaign plan set in place. There is no point in investing in extremely expensive campaigns unless you know how the money is returning back to you. One needs to ensure that click rates are good enough and they are being converted. These simulators help campaign managers and SEO professionals to get in depth analysis about what really is going on and how certain things can be improved.
Every organization or company must focus on their ad campaigns. The best place to start with is Google AdWords, before considering other ways to seek revenue. While it may seem daunting in the beginning, tools like these simulators help professionals to understand what would happen if budgets were increased or decreased. And that is very important for companies of all sizes, whether large, small or medium. These tools give an in-depth analysis of what really is going on beneath the surface and why one must increase or decrease in the succeeding weeks.
If you are unsure about what needs to be done for your ad campaign, you could always go ahead and speak to an SEO professional or a digital marketing professional for advice. You could also seek help for using these simulators so that you can better manage your ad campaigns. It may take a little while in the beginning but slowly you will get used to coordinate your budget and spending with that of the simulators’ results. There is nothing better than analyzing recent history and data in order to be prepared for the future. This is exactly what these simulators do and that too without any extra spending to be worried about. Certainly, these simulators are some of the best tools that Google has unveiled in recent years.
