About BidForce


What BidForce Does

BidForce automatically sets keyword bids on Google AdWordstm according to a desired conversion costs. For example, say you have a form on your website where people can register or check out, and you want to pay $5 for each of these conversions. BidForce will set your cost per click bids so that you reach your desired conversion cost. This is sometimes called ROI (Return On Investment) or CPA (Cost Per Action) bidding.

 

What BidForce Doesn't Do

BidForce does not allow you to edit or maintain your AdWordstm account, e.g. creating new keywords or updating copy. For that we recommend the very useful and totally free AdWords Editor tool from Google. However, for best performance, do not change your bids outside of BidForce.

 

Why was BidForce created?

BidForce was developed as an internal tool to fill the need of an existing online business. While other tools can do CPA bidding, they either didn't do a good job or were just to expensive. We wanted a sophisticated bidding algorithm which no other product offered. So, we developed our own and found it worked really well. So much so that we decided to take the extra effort to make it publically available.

 

What are the benefits of ROI bidding?

There are a number of ways to buy online advertising. First came CPM (Cost per thousand) where you paid a fixed fee for a number of impressions. While it could be effective, most of the time it wasn't. Then came CPC (Cost Per Click) where you pay for individual clicks to your website. Not only could you set your own cost, you also only pay on performance. However, with CPC bidding, you have to decide how much your willing to bid for a click on each keyword. The more you bid, the better position your ads receive resulting in more traffic. But exactly how much you should bid is not so easy to decide. Some will bid to try to maintain a certain position (and hence volume) but that is almost pointless. The only sensible strategy is to work out how much a click is actually worth and bid only that amount. You don't want to bid less because you want to maximize your position and hence volume. You definitely don't want to bid more because you might be making a loss on the advertising. The solution to the problem is ROI or CPA (Cost Per Action) bidding. Lets say your website takes registrations and you know each one is worth on average $10 to you. Perhaps your willing to pay $5 for each of those registration. If one in every twenty clicks converts to a registration (5%), you should be paying $5/20 = $0.25 per click. Now you can set your bid and know that you have maximized your bid according to what it's worth.

 

How Does BidForce work?

The main problem with a CPA bidding strategy is that you need to know how many clicks it takes to get a conversion. While Google can report this information to you, what you will find is that one day it might take just 10 clicks to get a conversion (10% conversion rate) while another day it might take 100 clicks to get a conversion (1% conversion rate). These are huge fluctuations. To make matters worse, you don't know how conversion rate changes over the short term, say day to day, or the long term i.e. month to month. Without knowing both the average conversion rate, and how much it can fluctuate by, its almost impossible to set your click cost to get a desired conversion cost. BidForce gives you graphs to see those fluctuations and uses powerful statistical methods to measure the changes over time, not only on an account wide basis, but also on an individual keyword basis. It uses a novel algorithm and sophisticated mathematical techniques to set the bid for each individual keyword exactly the right amount so that on average, over a long enough period, you will hit your target conversion cost. If you set a desired target conversion cost of $5, perhaps one day you will pay $8 and another day $3, but over the average, you will pay $5. Exactly what you wanted!

 

Does BidForce work with anything other than Google AdWordstm?

No. We decided to roll out with AdWordstm support because, at least for our own business, Google provide by far the largest majority of traffic. This is probably true for your business too. If the demand is there, we may consider support for other services.

 

How many keywords can BidForce manage?

Unlimited. The only real limitation is the amount of memory and hard drive space available on your computer. On a machine with a couple of Gigabytes of RAM, BidForce can comfortable manage thousands of keywords and optimize and update all those bids in a matter of seconds.

 

How often should I run BidForce?

There is absolutely no point trying to use BidForce to update your bids more than once a day, which is probably too often anyway. Exactly how often you should run BidForce will depend on a number of factors but it will probably be somewhere from every day to every week. Remember, gone are the days of trying to maintain a certain rank position or reacting to your competitors every move. BidForce uses click and conversion data to choose the right bid and maximize your traffic. This data is available on a daily basis and does not change much day to day.

 

What are BidForce Token Credits?

BidForce Token Credits are based on the Google AdWords API Quota based system. Click here for more info.

 

How much does BidForce cost?

Every BidForce operation that calls Google incurs a BidForce Token Credit cost. Different operations each have different costs. For example, generating a keyword history report uses 1000 BidForce Token Credits, updating a single keyword costs 10 Token Credits. The more credits you buy, the cheaper they become. BidForce is relatively efficient at not using more quota than it has to. Exactly how much BidForce costs depends on how much you use it and how big your account is. It is more efficient to try and estimate your long term token needs and buy in bulk. To buy BidForce Token Credits online with Google Checkout, click here.