We’re here to help enhance and broaden your strategy to stretch to new areas of opportunity.
Our customers (or the digital team they work with) are the digital marketing experts. We're not here to tell them how to do what they do best. Instead, we're here to help enhance and broaden their strategy to stretch to new areas of opportunity.
Specifically, we're here to help maximize the heightened visibility and interest that a television micro-moment creates for your brand and drive online engagement. (To learn more about micro-moments and the proven connection between television advertising and the online search journey, check out this article from Google.)
Nothing beats the reach of traditional media. Nothing beats the precision of digital marketing. Advocado Activate enables you to use both to your advantage in unison.
Bid Components Impacted by Advocado Activate
There are three components impacted by Advocado Actions. ("Actions" are the rules that dictate what happens to your digital ad bids when a TV spot is detected.) We need to set your:
- Estimated First Position Bid Multiplier
- Current Bid Multiplier
- Max Bid
Estimated First Position Bid Multiplier
When Google Ads provides it, Advocado will adjust the bid at the keyword level based on the estimated first position bid (EFPB). This EFPB is pulled from the Google API in real time. Advocado then applies the multiplier of your choice to that EFPB to ensure that you are well-positioned to be in the #1 spot. For the duration of your spot and for the 90 seconds following the spot, your standard bid will be overridden and moved to this newly calculated bid. Upon the conclusion of the 90 seconds following your ad, your standard bid will be restored.
For example, if Google's API returns an Estimated First Position bid of $50 and you have opted for an Estimated First Position Bid Multiplier of 150% and your Max Bid is $100, your Advocado Activate enhanced bid will be $75.
Current Bid Multiplier
When Google does not provide an estimated first position bid for a keyword, Advocado will instead base your bid adjustment on the current bid multiplier.
Max Bid
When we set the max bid in Advocado Activate, we are establishing the absolute CPC limit for keywords being boosted in these micro-moments. If the Google Ads API pulls back an EFPB that results in a higher bid than your Max Bid, your Max Bid takes effect. For the duration of your spot and for the 90 seconds following the spot, your standard max CPC will be overridden and moved to this new max bid. Upon the conclusion of the 90 seconds following your ad, your standard max CPC will be restored.
For example, if Google's API fails to return an Estimated First Position bid the Current Bid Multiplier is activated. If your current bid is $50 and you have opted for a Current Bid Multiplier of 200% and your Max Bid is $60, your Advocado Activate enhanced bid will be $60.
Budget Planning
Advocado Activate only works if you have a daily budget that allows for these boosted bid periods. Historically, we've only seen about a 10% increase in average CPC for Advocado Activate enhanced keywords relative to their control counterparts. But if you have a daily budget of $15 and are trying to boost hundreds of keywords that each cost around $3, the platform is not going to be able to do much for you. Allow enough budgetary space for targeted bid enhancements to help your overall performance.
Possible Bid Strategies
Bidding for First (According to Google) Strategy
If creating even the slightest possibility of a $1000 bid doesn't appeal to you, then let's get more strategic with the bid adjustment parameters. After deciding what keywords you want to boost, take the following steps to determine your numbers:
- Sort your chosen keywords by Estimated First Position Bid: what is the highest price?
- Then sort by Average CPC: what is the highest price?
- Sort by clicks to see what you're paying for your most engaging keywords.
Use this information to set your bid parameters. For your max bid, we recommend setting it to 150% above your highest average CPC. Assuming your highest estimated first position bid would fall within this max bid, we recommend making your estimated first position bid multiplier 125%+. If that results in a higher number than your max bid, it might be worth considering raising the max bid.
We recommend doubling your current bid (in other words, a current bid multiplier of 200%). Again, make sure that doubling your highest current bid would fall under your max bid. If not, consider raising it.
To-the-Max Strategy
If you have the budget and want to make sure that you're at the top of search results every time, we say max it out! The maximum bid Google now allows is $1000. Our system can multiply the Estimated First Position Bid by 400%. Our system can multiply your current bid by 1000%. If you've got the appetite, let's turn it all the way up!
Know that you’ll never actually pay more than $0.01 over the second position winner.
Already Bidding to #1
We get this question a lot. Many of the agencies we work with are already bidding to be #1 for their branded keywords. They want to know if they should include them in Advocado Activate’s bid adjustments, and if so, how they should set up their bid adjustment parameters for these particular keywords. These are great questions! We encourage you to include them because by pointing the highly-motivated television-viewing audience at these keywords, you are training Google Ads to find more people who look like your TV audience. Training Google Ads in this way is a huge value-add of connecting your TV and digital with Advocado Activate. In terms of how to set up these bid adjustments, we recommend maxing out the parameters--to the extent that you’re comfortable. If you’re already bidding to #1, we want to make sure we’re doing everything we can to help you maintain that position.