Max CPC vs Benchmark CPC

[1977]

I've got a google shopping campaign running that I've set the max cpc quite high in comparison to the benchmark cpc. It's at £1.50 with the benchmark cpc at 37p

This is a new campaign with products that have a good margin.

Is there anything to be gained by having a high cpc compared to my competitors benchmark cpc?

Should I drop mine down to just above the benchmark cpc and maximise my daily budget?

 

[Paul Carmen]

Have you actually experimented with this; e.g. you're potentially paying a premium to display with a high CPC on all products now?

That's fine if all products convert well and deliver a good ROI, but that needs testing and is only a small part of the setup to be successful with Shopping ads.

The key thing to remember is that Shopping ads are generated based on the product data you've set up in your Merchant Center account. So the relevance and success of your ads is determined by the product copy, as well as the bid for each search term a customer types. Usually there is also a wide range of performances across products, based on price and market popularity, plus search terms.

Generally you want to bid the best performers high, and be more selective around the others, as otherwise you'll spend lots of money on products that don't convert so well.

The way to do this properly is to test this all out with different bids and then analyse the keywords generating conversions. Once you have this data you can setup negative keywords to stop bids on terms that waste budget.

To take it a stage further and really maximise ROI, you can essentially then set this all up in a clever tiered way that allows you to bid very high on converting search terms for products, medium on OK search terms and bid very low on generic non buying/non converting terms for each product.

 

[1977]

Thanks for the response @Paul Carmen

To be fair, my thinking when setting the bids higher was to a) make sure I was being seen & b) gather as much data as possible.

The campaign has been profitable (just) from the start, but last night I cut my max CPC down to 30% above the benchmark CPC.

Today has seen the same amount of impressions, nearly double the clicks, and a 5% conversion rate with the conversion cost halving.

The next thing to tackle (apart from negative keywords) is the attribution models and understand them better. I'm not a big fan of the last click attribution.

 

[Larry Fong]

I always try to keep the max cpc low and use keyword match types such as phrase match, exact match, broad modified match to drive the most relevant traffic. You pay premium only increase your cost but serve no edge over your competitors.

 

[Paul Carmen]

I always try to keep the max cpc low and use keyword match types such as phrase match, exact match, broad modified match to drive the most relevant traffic. You pay premium only increase your cost but serve no edge over your competitors.

What are you talking about, the OPs question was about Google Shopping, you can't add keyword match types to drive traffic, its not a search campaign?