Bing recently announced changes to the way Enhanced CPC bidding works in their interface. If you currently use this bidding method, it’s important to understand how these changes can impact your advertising performance and adjust your strategy accordingly.
What is Enhanced CPC Bidding?
As a quick review, enhanced CPC is a bidding strategy that lets advertisers set ad group and keyword bids, then Bing adjusts bids in real-time to increase your chance of getting a conversion. Bing will increase your bid on searches that are more likely to convert and lower your bid on searches less likely to convert. This bidding strategy is the default strategy when you create a new campaign.
What Changes Were Made?
Previously, Bing would only increase your bid to 30% of the bid you set for your keyword. With this change, that limit has been removed. This basically means Bing can increase your bids to whatever amount it chooses if it thinks you’re going to get a conversion. The official announcement states “over the long haul, the Enhanced CPC bid strategy will try to make sure that your average CPC is not higher than your bid.”
How This Could Impact Advertisers
I don’t feel particularly confident in that vague description of how Bing will try to control costs. How long is “the long haul”? Does it mean over 30 days average CPC will try to not be higher than your bid or is it a longer time frame? What happens if you adjust your bid on a regular basis, how does Bing determine which bid amount to keep average CPC below?
This change leaves a lot unknown and seems like another way advertisers are losing control over these “optimized” settings. If you are using Enhanced CPC, I recommend paying close attention to your avg CPC and cost per conversion to see how they compare to before this change was made at the end of October. If you find you are spending more but not generating more conversions, I recommend switching to manual bidding or target CPA if you have enough conversion data.
Have you seen any performance changes to your Enhanced CPC campaigns since Bing Ads made this change? If so, let us know in the comments below.
