San Francisco — Have you ever wondered what would happen if you altered the performance of your paid search campaigns with a different AdWords bidding strategy, then Google has unveiled the feature for you. Google AdWords has just launched a fascinating new featured called Bid Simulator to help you see what could have been if you had bid differently, delivering you you an amazing insight into the potential impact of changing the bid price on your advertising results.
Referred to as the Bid Simulator, the latest feature that has just been introduced recently from Google and is now available to more AdWords advertisers, allows them to reproduce what could have happened had they bid differently on the previous campaign week. Note the use of the term “previous” — the feature cannot predict scenarios, it merely re-calculates the number of impressions an ad could have shown, based on the previous week’s data, had a different maximum CPC been chosen.
The following image gives an example of the bid simulator in action with the keyword as keyword.
The bid simulator basically displays you how many impressions and how your ad position would look, if you increased or decreased your bid price.
Although the feature does allows advertisers to make better judgments on which keywords to modify spends on, providing a better picture of the trade-off between cost and click-through volume. Nevertheless, “it cannot foretell the future, the bid simulator allows you to explore what could have happened if you had set different keyword-level bids,” says Dan Friedman of Google’s Inside AdWords crew.
“The feature offers increased transparency into the AdWords auction and gives you the insight to make more informed bidding decisions to meet your advertising objectives,” said Friedman.
Nevertheless, with this cool new feature, advertisers can now take advantage of the information they obtain from the Bid Simulator and apply changes to their campaigns in the future, should they choose to do so. As Friedman notes, however, past performance does not guarantee future results.
To use the Bid Simulator, go to the “keywords” tab in your AdWords Account, click the bid simulator icon in the Max. CPC column next to the bid of any keyword.
Google’s AdWords team has also released an educational video explaining the tool in more detail, which can be viewed here.
Bid like a pro with Bid Simulator: