PPC Bid Strategies for Adwords PLA Campaign

[amitramani]

I am managing a Google Adwords Product Listing Ads (PLA) campaign. The campaign is granular and specific in that each product is targeted via its corresponding ad groups. The structure of the campaign is :

Campaign->500 Ad Groups (each ad group targeting a unique product selected by "product_id".

I would like to get some ideas and feedback on bidding strategies. The granular structure of the campaign allows me to set a different Default Max CPC and a Max CPC for each unique product.

I am unable to find within Adwords a column that shows what the competition is bidding. Is there a methodical procedure to extract this bidding information? I have recently enabled "Search Impression Share" and "Search Impression Lost (IS Rank)", but there is not enough data yet for those stats.

What do the PPC experts have to say?

[stever999]

Hi,

I would recommend using the Google Keyword Planner - http://adwords.google.com/keywordplanner

This tool will tell you the average cost per click for a keyword... It will give you an indication of what to bid however there are other factors to consider when trying to calculate this such as quality score of the keyword...

Steve

[amitramani]

Thanks, Steve for the insight. I will check out Google Keywords Planner.

Talking about Quality Score, is it even applicable to Product Listing Ads (PLA)? There are no explicit keywords for PLA's, so I am not sure if a quality score is attached. Any ideas?

On a related note, I was chatting to a Google Adwords Specialist (from Google) and she recommended a Max CPC of 0.50 for each keyword.

Any comments?