What is a bidding strategy?

Sponsored Products contribute to a high ranking of your item on bol’s list pages. However, when a customer clicks on one of your sponsored items, you pay a certain price per click. Setting how much you are willing to pay per click is done through a bidding strategy. You can either let bol’s algorithm automatically determine this click price, or you can manually set a bid, which is the maximum price per click for your sponsored item. Below, you can learn more about the different bidding strategies.

Automatic Bidding Strategy

A campaign with an automatic bidding strategy is an excellent way to start, whether you’re new to sponsored products or have experience in advertising. When you choose automatic bidding, you can set a desired ACoS (Advertising Cost of Sale) between 5% and 50%. The automatic bidding strategy uses this desired ACoS as a guideline for the bids in your campaign. Keep in mind that it’s a guideline, and the realized ACoS may be higher or lower.

Automatic bidding provides valuable insights, especially in the early stages of a campaign when you’re unsure about the approximate cost per click (CPC). If your campaign is running smoothly with automatic bidding, that’s great! If you find that you’re paying too much or too little for a click, you can adjust the desired ACoS in the ‘campaign settings.’ It might also be interesting to set up a new campaign and choose manual bidding. A good indicator for this is the ‘average winning bid,’ which is the average click price paid by winning advertisers in the auction. If this is significantly lower than your average CPC, you might consider setting a more competitive target ACoS or placing a manual bid.

Manual Bidding Strategy

You can also opt for manual bidding, where you set a bid for each item or keyword in your campaign. This bid represents the maximum click price you are willing to pay. If you find it challenging to estimate an appropriate bid, start with the maximum amount you are currently willing to pay for a click. After a few days, if you realize your bid is too high or too low to achieve your desired results, adjust the bid and repeat this process until the results align with your expectations.

Bid on Products

When bidding on products, you set a maximum click price per product. This is the maximum amount you’re willing to pay per click when someone clicks on your item. The advantage of this bidding strategy is that you have a lot of control over the click price for each item. You may choose to set the same bid for every item or occasionally raise the bid for one item while lowering it for another. This way, you can showcase specific items from time to time.

Bid on Keywords

When bidding on a keyword, you set the maximum click price per keyword. If you have items you want to display for various keywords, bidding on keywords might be beneficial. For certain keywords, you can set a higher bid than for others.