AdWords script plus ECPC - good idea?

[Matthias Baader]

Hey folks,

would you recommend using ECPC if the CPCs are readjusted hourly by an AdWords script?

Thanks for your thoughts

Matthias

[Michael Cloonan]

Hello,

It's probably not a good idea to adjust bids hourly with an ECPC bidding strategy, since ECPC adjusts bids over time to help maximize conversions. When you change the bids, it interrupts the learning process which is likely going to lead to less than ideal results.

If you want to control your bids manually, you should likely do your own bid optimization and stick to simpler bidding strategies like Manual CPC.

This forum is generally for Scripts-specific issues, such as helping to get a script up and running or reporting bugs you find when using scripts. For general AdWords discussions, you should check out the AdWords community.

Regards,

Mike, AdWords Scripts Team

[Matthias Baader]

Hi Mike,

thank you. My thoughts were the same - but then I found several threads here that indicates that it might not be uncommon using ECPC in combination with CPC-adjustments via scripts. E.G. this one:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!search/ecpc/adwords-scripts/LwYeJe7rBrw/It5fDebqYl0J

The point is that you have only limited options to adjust the CPCs in shopping campaigns manually. So even if you isolate the brand queries from the rest, there might still be a broad range of queries that match for a specific item and one given CPC. Thus, in theory the combination of ECPC and CPC-adjustment via scripts could be a good idea. So I just wanted to know if there are any new experiences re this matter. 

Oh - and I had called the support about this matter before. They recommended posting my question here :-)

Regards

Matthias

[Michael Cloonan]

Hello,

As mentioned, my expertise and the expertise of my team is primarily in the mechanical aspect of getting the scripts to do what you want. On the business logic side, that's really entirely up to you. Maybe another user can weigh in if they've had experience with this. Alternatively, you could just try it out and see how it goes.

Although this feature is not supported directly by scripts, you could try out Campaign drafts and experiments for this. If you manually set up an experiment, you can set up your script to modify bids on only the experimental campaign, but keep the other campaign as is with no bids, then after a period of time compare the performance of the two to see which you like better.

Regards,

Mike, AdWords API Team