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By Nidhi Kapoor, AMO- Senior Consultant, Adobe
Edit: This post has been published as a Knowledge Base Article for Adobe Media Optimizer and can be viewed here ![]()
Bid & Average Position Constraints - Substantial Support in Competitor Strategy.
In a day to day marketer’s life word ‘competitor’ plays an important role. Some part of success for a marketer lies if he/she can steer their marketing efforts through the turbulent marketing environment by doing it better than competitors.
As we all know there is no mantra to be positioned always ahead in marketing efforts or value proposition than competitors but yes there are some smart moves that can be tried to enhance all marketing efforts.
In Search marketing we all know how competitive the industry is. With changes from Google for right hand side ads, it has gone to extreme competition now from bid/CPC to ad position. This in turn contributes to overall conversions efficiency. In such an environment if some great tool and a feature can help us expedite our search marketing efforts and stay ahead from competitor’s ad position can be very useful.
Average Position on search ads has a good weight in fetching traffic and brand awareness. Maintaining the position is also not that easy. Yes, this is where Adobe Media Optimizer’s (AMO) ‘Bid & Position Constraint’ feature can support in maximizing the efforts.
Case Study
See a case study as an example of performance below where the brand generic search ads were fluctuating from the position 1 and securing the competitive impression share. Though the impression share was higher than competitors, however, as the keywords included brand terms, it was expected to maintain the position 1 with good impressions and outranking share.
To ensure the longer appearance in a day and at ad position 1, daily budget limit was increased as the first step. Despite that the average position was fluctuating throughout the day and competitor’s ads were seen at ad position 1 occasionally.
In such case, a ‘Bid & Position’ constraint feature of AMO was advised to be tested. It is a simplest type of constraint option in AMO which allows to restrict optimizer’s keywords bids to a bid and position range specified.
A test for two weeks was run to see if that helps in maintaining the position ‘1’ and increase in impression share to some extent. Following were the results secured after two weeks compared with previous weeks and helped the case with some improvement in its metrics.
- Impression share increased by 15%.
- Ad’s avg. Position improved by 20%.
- Outranking share improved by 70% from the immediate competitor.
- Impressions decreased by 13% WOW, however, with improved avg. position, overall traffic increased by 97%.
So by setting up the AMO’s bid and position constraint as 1 and assigning the max. bid value to it, helped the case and keywords to maintain their ads’ position during the test period and secured improved results than its competitors.
How did this happen, what are these constraints and how do they help? Let’s see below.
What are Constraints?
Constraints are bid rules that can restricts bid on bid units (keyword + match type) to a specific range or position range to support in maximizing the objective*.
Constraint’s rules are an optional feature AMO provides to support and maximize the objective. It can be applied to bid units associated with label.
What are Labels?
Labels are a group of entities under a common name for the purpose of reporting, management and constraining*.
Any entity such as keywords can have multiple labels. Also, any label can have multiple entities such as Keywords, ad groups, campaigns etc.
How to create a constraint?
- A Label needs to be created first. To create a label, following steps are to be taken.
- Create a label or select a pre-existing label and assign to entities.
For e.g. Click on Search Campaigns Labels Create Labels following screen will appear.
- Once the label is created by executing above steps, go to the entity level such as keywords in search tab and select the keywords by selecting the check box and assign those to the created label and save changes.
- Once the above step is done, label tab should be visited to see the entities assigned to the label and also to create a constraint further.
- To configure the constraint:
- Click on the cog beside the label created.
- Define Keyword level conditions. Multiple conditions can be applied for each constraint. These conditions can be evaluated as ‘And’ or ‘OR’.
- Select constraint type from the drop down option and set values if applicable.
- Bid & Pos. Constraint (It is covered in this article where ‘Min Pos’ ‘Max Pos’ and ‘Min and Max Bid’ were advised efficiently)
- Variable Bid & Pos. Constraint (Create a single constraint that has different min/max bid and/or min/max position constraint values for each keyword associated to the constraint*)
- Context Sensitive Bid (Keywords can be bid to the average CPC of the portfolio, campaign, or ad group it belongs to*)
- Incremental Bidding (Bid keywords incrementally from their current bid to a target bid*)
- Search Engine Minimum Bid (This constraint will use the minimum CPC bids set by the search engines as the optimizer’s minimum bids*)
- Performance constraints (This constraint is based on bid unit’s performance)
- CPA Target
- ROI Target
- Margin Target
- Bid Shift (The Bid Shift constraint allows you to shift bids up or down from the current optimized bid for all constrained keywords*)
- Define run period, outside that optimizer will have full control of bids.
- After configuring the constraint, click on the ‘Save’ button.
- Once the label has been constrained, the label will appear with an icon to show that it is constrained label in the left navigation panel and in the label drop-list.
It is not always guaranteed by setting up the constraints such as in the above case the ‘Bid and Position’ constraint, the ad will appear at position 1 always. This could be of various reasons such as if the daily budget limit is reached then it will be difficult to maintain the constraint positioning for rest of the day. However, by setting up these we are actually prioritizing the rule in AMO and directing technology to action accordingly.
*Definition taken from AMO training material from Gauri Bhat.
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