Advertising on the web is an ever-evolving space filled with the potential for billions of people to see your ads and literally thousands of metrics to determine who to target, when, and where. That’s why it’s important to have the right Flexible bid strategies in place when you go to try and win that all-important ad space on Google.
PPC ads have the potential to generate many high-quality and high converting leads to your site or business, but only if you do it right. Trying to pick the right strategy can be a mind-numbing process. Beyond just the headache-inducing number of metrics that are available, there is a whole realm of other considerations to make to figure out how, when, and where to run your PPC ads.
Google itself can do a lot to help you figure out who to target and when. The trouble is, unless you have experience and know exactly what you’re doing, you may find yourself wasting ad dollars on typical “set it and forget it” ad campaigns.
You’ll often find that these campaigns aren’t doing much other than throwing your money away. If you want to make the most of them, you have to stay on top of your ad campaigns and the strategies you’re using.
This first section deals with how ad campaigns should operate and how to tell if yours are in a good position for new flexible bid strategies.
Before we dive into the different strategies and how to implement them, we want to set you up for success. To do that, we’re going to break down what you should be doing to put yourself in a prime position to make use of the different flexible bid strategies that are available.
The very first thing we recommend doing if you aren’t already is getting in touch with a PPC management company. If you already have one, and they’re not using flexible bid strategies, then you may want to take a look at what you’re paying for and how much you’re paying. Oftentimes, agency fees and returns may not align with your goals or the level of service may not meet up to the needs of your particular ad campaigns. You may want to consider firing your PPC agency if you notice that they’re wasting ad dollars, you’re not seeing growth or other signs that you’re throwing money away.
Once you have that settled and you’ve gotten with an agency that knows what they’re doing, the first thing you really want them to do is to perform a PPC audit. The purpose of having an agency do a PPC audit is to get a sense of where your ad campaigns are at and what is potentially going wrong. Google Ads gives you loads of valuable data, but that doesn’t necessarily tell you what to do with it.
By getting an audit done, you can find out where your ad dollars are going, how much of a return on investment (ROI) you’re getting, and what the problems are. Not only that, but you’ll actually get actionable steps you can take to make improvements on your ad campaigns to see them grow your return on ad spend (ROAS).
They say “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” but if it is broke, you might want to actually know how to fix it or take it to someone who can. That’s why getting with a PPC management company and getting an audit done should be your first step.
Next, we’ll discuss how to analyze your marketing objectives to make sure they line up with your business goals.
Part of knowing what’s wrong and how to fix it means understanding your goals and what you’re really trying to do with your ad campaigns. It may be that depending on the type of campaign you’re running, you may find that while you think a search campaign is best, you want a local PPC campaign, because you’re trying to drive traffic to a brick-and-mortar store.
Through Google’s advanced resources for ad campaigns, you can help to identify your goals and the type of campaigns you should be running. Then, with the help of your ad agency, you can pick the best practices for the types of goals that you have and your advertising budget.
Google’s metrics can help you figure out what campaign to run and a PPC agency can help you execute the process, including managing your bids, increasing your bids, making changes to existing campaigns starting new campaigns, and monitoring performance.
If you find that the objectives you had set aren’t right for your business, then it may be time to pull out of any existing campaigns, reevaluate, and then relaunch.
One flaw that some agencies and businesses often make is to continue to run with an existing campaign that isn’t working. Part of analyzing your marketing objectives is determining if a campaign that’s failing can be salvaged or not. There’s no point in going down with the ship if you can make it back to shore and try again later with a better boat.
Now that we’ve covered how to align your goals with your marketing strategy, it’s time to talk about how you measure success via key metrics.
Sometimes the problem isn’t even the ad campaign itself; it’s the data you’re using to drive the ad campaign. Realistically, if you’re using an ad agency, they should be helping you do this. If you don’t really know what you want out of your ad campaigns, it can be tricky to manage.
If for instance, you’re in the eCommerce space, but when running ads, you’re not looking at the time of day when consumers are more likely to shop and complete a purchase (we’re not talking about those 2 AM window shoppers who click ad to cart and never buy anything) then you’re likely running ads at the wrong time and not targeting the proper audience.
Additionally, the type of ad and the platform you run them on can make a major difference, too. Demographics change based on the platform the ads are seen on and the likelihood of conversion is tied to that as well.
For example, managing Facebook ads is entirely different from managing your Google search ads. Your audience changes based on the types of ads you run and not knowing who is doing what will lead to wasted ad dollars. From your Google Ads account, you can see all the data you could ever need to figure out who’s logging on, where they’re seeing your ads, when they’re most likely to click them, and when they actually follow through and convert.
If your ad timing or methods aren’t meshing with the majority of your traffic, then it’s a safe bet that you’re wasting your money.
It’s also important to note that these metrics aren’t static values that you can keep running with forever once you know them. Marketing is ever-moving, ever-changing and you have to put in the work to keep up. That’s why we recommend having a marketing agency do the work, but making sure that it’s one that has your goals in mind and is willing to stay on top of the key metrics and the space you’re in to keep your ads performing their best.
That’s why we’ve written this guide to flexible bid strategy in the first place. There are some experts and businesses that still believe that once you’ve locked in a bid strategy that works, you’re good to go. That’s not how ad campaigns or marketing in general operate. What works today may stop working tomorrow. Flexible bid strategy are designed to be just that, flexible.
The next section covers what automated or Manual bidding actually is and how it works. We know some readers have a good grasp of the concept, but for those that don’t, this is key information before implementing a flexible bid strategy Aims.
Just because flexible bid strategies have the word flexible in their name doesn’t mean that you can just set them and change them any way you choose at any time. The better you understand automated bidding, the better you can make use of the powerful tool that it is.
All automated bidding strategies work off of parameters that you set. This means that if it doesn’t work, it’s likely tied back to something you told the program to do. With enough input and the right configurations, automated or different Flexible bidding strategies can work like magic for your ad campaign, routinely scoring you the optimal converting ad space you need to drive loads of high converting traffic to your site.
That’s why we said that it’s not about a “set it and forget it mentality.” You have to constantly monitor your Flexible bid strategies and adjust them to meet your needs as they change. As your business grows, your audience grows and changes with it. To think of it logically, think about ads that are run for products, consider what happens if new products are added to an existing line, the target audience may change and grow with the product line. That means your existing ad campaigns need to adjust too.
Flexible bid strategies allow you to move and adjust parameters on the fly. The different strategies also allow you to account for different metrics and adjust your return expectations if your audience and traffic volume change. If you have more traffic but few conversions, you can adjust your ad strategy to maximize conversions for the increased traffic flow.
The upcoming section deals with flexible bid strategies in practice and how to properly implement them based on your needs. We included some key pointers that apply to each strategy and how best to use them.
All your bidding strategies can be managed through your Google Ads account dashboard. From the dashboard, you can see all of the different ad strategies that you have available and can create and modify them as you see fit.
Among your choices, there are 6 flexible bid strategies that allow Google to automate your bidding process while giving you the control you need to adjust your bids if something isn’t working or your market changes.
This is one of the standard Google ad campaign strategies and is used when you want your bids to drive traffic over all else. You can control spending by setting a maximum bid amount and a maximum daily ad spend amount. This does not factor in conversion rates or other factors. It will target based on your set keywords, and the bidding will moderate within your set/target spend amount so that you don’t go over budget.
This strategy is best implemented when your main goal is just to get more people to see your site over all else. As we said, this focuses on clicks and not conversions, but sometimes click volume can relate to conversion and brand recognition. The ability to set and monitor spending lets you have more control over ad spend if you’re on a tight budget, or if you’re experimenting with a new ad campaign and want to see what type of results you can get without breaking the bank.
You can, of course, implement this strategy without setting daily spending limits/target spend amount, but this can burn through your ad spend budget. Our best implementation advice is to use this strategy when you need maximum site traffic without blowing your ad budget.
Targeted automated flexible bid strategies are great for when you want to win auctions that offer a certain value for the ad dollars you spend. In the case of this strategy, you can set a percentage value for what type of return you want on every ad dollar that is spent, and Google will automatically adjust bid amounts and auction preferences based on available data.
There are a few caveats to this strategy. Target ROAS strategies are built to get you the most return they can; this means that they will only target auctions based on the available data and are likely to generate the set return based on the available data. This also means that in most cases, they will spend whatever is calculated to be necessary to win auctions. This can be a problem if you don’t set the values for your maximum daily ad spend and the maximum cost per click.
Even with high returns, you can find yourself spending more per click than you end up actually converting. For example, say you pay $15 to get 3 new customers, sounds great right? But then those customers come into your store and only spend $3 each. You’ve effectively spent more for customers than you gain by acquiring them. ROAS strategies aren’t perfect, so you’re working partly on data and partly on guesswork.
The second issue is that if your ROAS is set too high, you may find that the bidding is too selective and you don’t wind up winning very many auctions as a result, meaning fewer ads overall.
If you have great metrics and lots of data built up to facilitate a solid understanding of the types of auctions to bid on, then a targeted ROAS strategy is the perfect option to ensure that your ad dollars aren’t wasted. Just make sure you set a spending maximum bid limit so you don’t outpace your budget.
This is another targeted strategy that bids based on a set value. In this case, it’s the cost per customer or cost per acquisition. This is not to be confused with a cost-per-action model that calculates costs based on clicks or other actions. A cost per acquisition targeting strategy bids on ads based on an average set by the campaign owner.
Google will adjust bids higher or lower, within a range of the target Cost Per acquisition in order to win auctions. Target cost per acquisition, You must have at least 15 conversions in the past 30 days and an average conversion rate over the last 7 days in order to implement this strategy. Beyond the base requirements, like other targeting strategies, the more data you have about past conversions and customer data you can feed into it, the better it will perform.
This strategy is ideally implemented when you’re interested in achieving valuable conversions while controlling the cost. This type of targeting strategy has more control than a ROAS strategy as the bidding can fluctuate within a set range without spending too high or bidding on too few auctions.
This strategy is an evolved form of the standard cost per click model. It takes the standard cost per click structure and automatically adjusts the bidding up or down within a set range to win auctions that maximize conversions.
A standard CPC campaign bids on auctions at or under a certain cost per click without regard for other factors. This is done to control spending. Enhanced CPC gives the same measure of control while accounting for conversion rates. This means that you can control cost per click spending while still getting the benefits of higher conversion rates.
If you’re trying to control spending and need to reign in CPC, but still want ads that convert, this is a valuable strategy.
This strategy is used when you want your ads to rank higher than competitors in the same space. The automated bidding algorithm will adjust or increase your bid to beat out a competitor to either appear higher up on the SERP or to appear more frequently than a competitor.
The strategy is based on estimates and attempts to win auctions over competitors so that when ads are displayed yours show up first or more frequently. The issue with this strategy is that it does not actually raise your ad rank, the spending is not as easy to monitor, and there are no guarantees that you will always outrank your competitors as the results are estimates based on available data.
This is a useful strategy when you have a competitive market and are trying to gain some market share over others. Be mindful of your spending and you can make some ground in the market by manipulating ad placement to your advantage.
The goal of the target search Page Location strategy is to get your ad either on the top of the page or somewhere on page one of the SERP. Marketers know how valuable SERP placement is, especially on page one.
A target search Page Location strategy cannot guarantee that you will end up on the top of a page or that you will land on page one of the SERP. Each individual auction is different and based on the number of competitors and your quality score, your placement will change with these factors and the result of the auction.
While the Target search Page Location strategy isn’t bulletproof, Target search Page Location are the best option when you’re trying to maximize visibility over all else. It can help you appear on page one or on the top of pages and at the very least ensures that people will see your ads some of the time.
So, there we are, the 6 flexible bid strategies and how best to use them to improve your business. Hopefully, we’ve given you the advice and strategies you need to use each of these strategies to the best of their potential. Whether you’re trying to control spending, improve exposure, beat your competitors, or maximize conversions, one of these flexible bid strategies will work for you.
As long as you remember to set your parameters and monitor your bids, these options offer more control and more choice than typical bid strategies and will improve your odds of success. Remember, PPC isn’t something you can set on autopilot. Do your research, keep tabs, and get help from a PPC agency to maximize your marketing effectiveness.
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Pay-per-click (PPC) remains one of the fastest paths to pipeline, but the economics vary widely by industry and are shifting as AI reshapes the SERP. CPCs are up versus prior years, conversion rates have improved in many categories, and lead quality is increasingly a function of how well advertisers feed first-party data into bidding models.
The table below summarizes 2025 search-PPC benchmarks by sector—CPC, conversion rate (CVR), and cost per lead (CPL)—so you can compare what “good” looks like in your niche and calibrate ROI assumptions.
Use these numbers as directional guardrails, then layer in your own close rates and LTV to get to the only metric that matters: profitable growth.
In short, AI is changing the way PPC campaign management is occurring, and it's happening FAST.
ROI ≈ (Close-Rate × Avg Customer LTV ÷ CPL) − 1
Example (legal): if close-rate 12% and LTV $6,000 on CPL $132 → ROI ≈ (0.12×6000 / 132) −1 ≈ 4.45x (345% net). Improve any one input (faster intake bumps close-rate; better routing lowers CPL) and ROI jumps. Benchmarks for CPL/CVR above provide solid starting points. LocaliQ
PPC will keep paying when two things are true:
(1) you can convert and qualify leads quickly, and
(2) your bidding models are trained on the outcomes that actually make you money.
As AI compresses differences in targeting, the edge shifts to first-party data, creative velocity, and value-based bidding.
Treat the benchmarks above as starting points, then rebuild your ROI math from the ground up: ROI ≈ (Close Rate × LTV ÷ CPL).
Contact us today for your customized PPC audit to see how we can improve your search engine marketing ad spend.
When you’re running pay-per-click (PPC) ads, it’s easy to assume clicks mean genuine interest, but most car shoppers are just kicking tires online. Seeing your inventory once doesn’t mean they’re ready to buy anytime soon or even at all. If you want to reach the portion of clicks that come from serious buyers, you need to use retargeting.
The reality is that even prospects who intend to buy a car will bounce before contacting you or visiting your lot in person. And if you don’t have a way to keep them aware of your business, when they’re ready to buy, they’ll buy from a competitor. Running retargeted ads will keep your dealership in their awareness even after they bounce.
According to a 2022 Cox Automotive Car Buyer Journey Study, the average person spends more than 14 hours searching for a new car, which includes visiting around 5 websites before making a purchase decision. The sites they visit include automakers, dealers, third-party sites, and pre-owned car lots with online inventory. Your prospects aren’t going to buy right away, so to get the sale you need to reel them back in. If you’re not using retargeting – also called remarketing – in your PPC campaign, you’re missing out on hot leads.
Buying a car isn’t a small decision. People compare makes, models, and deals and look for dealerships with great reputations. Getting a single click from a potential car buyer isn’t enough to make the sale. And when they bounce, there’s no guarantee they’ll remember you exist. You’re paying for all those initial clicks, and if potential leads never come back you’ve wasted your ad spend. When you use retargeting, you’ll have another chance to turn their curiosity into a conversation, and that’s why remarketing is an essential component in every PPC ad campaign.
PPC ad retargeting for car dealerships shows your ads to people who have already clicked on an ad or visited your website. When implemented strategically, it keeps your dealership visible across multiple platforms and follows those people across the web. For example, when you run retargeted ads on the Google Display Network, your display ads will show up on the blogs, news sites, and apps your prospects frequent.
You can also run retargeting campaigns on social media sites like Facebook and Instagram. As long as your prospects scroll through their daily feed, your ads will show up for them if they’ve already interacted with you. YouTube also offers retargeting options with video ads that play right before the content. In fact, don’t underestimate the power of YouTube video advertising. According to data from Wyzowl, video ads convince 84% of people to buy a product or service.
Not everyone searching for a new car will respond to the same bland, boilerplate message. For example, someone browsing luxury SUVs isn’t going to click on an ad that says, “Low APR on all models!” That’s where remarketing shines. It lets you tailor your message to what each user actually wants, which increases response rates.
With retargeting, you can segment your audience based on their interests and behavior. For example, someone comparing financing terms won’t be swayed by flashy sports car imagery. With retargeting, you can show truck shoppers truck ads and sports car shoppers sports car ads. It sounds simple, but it’s one of the most powerful marketing methods of all time. People are far more responsive to messages that feel personal. You may have caught their attention with a general ad at first, but once they start browsing those SUVs on your website, you can retarget them with SUV ads.
When you use retargeting, you can provide different calls to action (CTAs) to users based on how they’ve engaged with your web pages. A visitor who spent a lot of time on your truck inventory pages can be served ads for your latest truck deals. Someone who checked out your lease specials can be hit with ads that talk about financing offers. It’s deceptively simple and brutally effective. Relevance is everything. When your ads reflect what the prospect was already thinking about, it feels personal and resonates.
A next-level tactic is using engagement depth to determine how strong your call to action should be. For instance:
· Multi-page viewers and long dwell times. These are warm leads and can be retargeted with stronger CTAs like “Book a test drive” and “Get a quote today.” They’re close to converting and just need a little push.
· Single-page bouncers. These are people who just peeked at your site. They can be re-engaged with lighter touchpoints like a general promotion or model comparison guide to reel them back in.
· Abandoned lead forms. If someone started filling out a form but didn’t finish, retarget them with a reminder and a stronger offer to sweeten the deal (e.g., “Complete your form for $500 off!”).
This level of nuance turns retargeting into a conversion machine and allows you to show the customer exactly what they want to see.
People don’t buy cars from whatever dealer they find first. That’s too risky. They buy from dealerships they trust and that feel familiar. You can build that sense of familiarity and trust through retargeting. For example:
· Consistent branding across ads. Using consistent branding, design, and messaging throughout your ads reinforces your dealership’s identity.
· Frequency builds familiarity. People need to see a brand between 5-7 times before they’ll remember it. Retargeting puts your dealership in front of people over and over again. Even if they don’t click right away, it’s helping to establish your credibility.
· Social proof works. When you use social proof like customer testimonials or awards in your ads it builds trust with your prospects.
Trust is earned over time, and retargeting will help you get it.
If you’re not using retargeting, your competitors definitely are. Car dealerships operate in one of the most brutally competitive markets out there, with national chains and franchise giants dominating search results and flooding ad channels with endless budgets. If you’re not showing up again and again, your competitors will, and they’ll scoop up all your leads.
The good news is you don’t need a massive marketing budget to get results. Retargeting allows smaller, local dealerships to play smart rather than trying to play big. When you focus on local PPC with hyper-targeted remarketing, you can reach a smaller, more qualified audience – people who are actually in your area, browsing your inventory, and likely to buy soon.
And unlike those cookie-cutter campaigns from national dealers, you can make your messaging feel personal and specific to your local community. That’s an edge big budgets don’t have.
Every visitor who leaves your website without converting is a potential sale but not necessarily lost. With smart retargeting, you can bring them back into your funnel and stay top-of-mind while your competitors waste money shouting into the void. Persistence wins the sale and retargeting is how you stay on the map.
To be blunt, search ads can get expensive fast, especially when clicks can cost a couple dollars per click. Pouring money into cold traffic is gambling on people who may not be ready to engage. Retargeting changes everything.
Display retargeting clicks typically cost a fraction of what you’d pay for search ads using competitive keywords. You’re no longer paying top dollar to get someone’s attention from scratch – you’re nudging people who already know who you are, and those people are more likely to respond. This makes retargeting one of the most cost-effective ways to use your advertising budget.
· Lower CPC, higher intent. Retargeting costs less per click, but you’re targeting people who already visited your site and showed interest.
· Better conversion rates. Familiarity breeds trust. Retargeted visitors are statistically more likely to convert than new users who just clicked an ad out of curiosity.
· Higher ROI. Since retargeting reaches warm leads, the cost of acquiring a lead is usually lower, which means your overall cost per lead is lower and you get better ROI.
If you’re skipping remarketing because you think it’s just something “extra” that doesn’t make a difference, you’re not saving money – you’re losing easy wins. Instead of perpetually chasing new, cold traffic, invest in converting the traffic you’re already getting. That’s exactly what remarketing does.
Generic ads are fine for first impressions, but once someone has browsed your inventory it’s time to get specific with dynamic retargeting. Here’s how it works:
When a prospect views a specific vehicle on your site, you can use retargeting ads to show them the exact vehicles they viewed and others like it down to the year, color, trim, and mileage. For example, if they looked at a black 2005 BMW 535i, that’s exactly what they’ll see in the ad – the same photos, same specs, all across sites like YouTube, Facebook, news platforms, and more. This reminds your prospects of exactly what they want.
Dynamic retargeting works by integrating your live inventory feed with your ad platform, like Google Ads or Meta. This means the vehicles displayed in your ads will always be up to date and won’t feature cars you sold last week.
Beyond personalization, dynamic ads are an incredible tool for creating a sense of urgency:
· Leverage scarcity. With these ads, you can leverage the power of scarcity by stating that your inventory won’t last. Using messages like “Only 1 left” or “Recently reduced” signals that the opportunity won’t last.
· Show what’s popular. If a particular model is getting a lot of views, let your prosects know. People don’t want to miss out on a good deal.
· Trigger action with FOMO. Fear of missing out is real, and when people see the car they want again – with a reminder that it might sell soon – they’re more likely to come in for a test drive.
By using retargeted ads, you can increase conversion rates by up to 200% compared to standard display ads. These ads feel more like a helpful reminder than an outright advertisement.
If you’ve never run paid ads before, it’s easy to assume your only options are basic keyword targeting and generic follow-up ads. But today’s ad platforms give you a buffet of hyper-specific targeting capabilities to fine-tune exactly who sees your ads, where, when, and how.
One of the most effective PPC retargeting tactics for car dealerships is location-based targeting. With radius targeting, you can serve ads to people within a specified distance from your dealership, like within 10-15 miles. These will be prospects who are not only likely to visit your site but could realistically walk into your showroom today. Don’t waste ad spend on clicks from people three states away.
Then there are device-specific campaigns. If your analytics show that 75% or your traffic comes from mobile (this is common), you can launch a mobile-only retargeting campaign with click-to-call buttons, mobile-optimized landing pages, and a map and directions built right into your ads. This will improve the user experience and increase conversion rates.
Timing also matters. When you schedule your ads you can control when they appear. Run them during lunch breaks, in the evenings, or on weekends when people have more time to browse car listings and are more likely to make big purchase decisions.
Other strategic targeting elements include:
· Demographic targeting. You can tailor your messages based on age, income level, and household status. A 25-year-old college grad and a 45-year-old parent are not shopping for the same reasons even though they might buy the same car.
· Behavioral triggers. You can create audiences for your retargeted ads based on repeat visits, clicks, video views, or interaction with a specific feature like a trade-in calculator.
· Lookalike audiences. Build new audiences that resemble your best customers. Platforms like Meta and Google are really good at identifying similar users based on their behavior online.
The bottom line is that retargeting doesn’t have to be broad. With the right strategy, it becomes a smart, cost-effective system for reaching the right prospects at the right time.
Have a sale, lease offer, or year-end clearance? Retargeting can amplify the urgency to act now. By offering short-term discounts and financing deals, you can tap into the urgency people feel when presented with time-sensitive offers. Emphasize the end date using a countdown timer or final deadline to create FOMO (fear of missing out).
With this type of retargeting, you can align your ads with your email messaging to increase conversions even more. For example, if you sent out a promotion to your email list, they’re likely to see your retargeted ads and be reminded of the deal you’re offering.
Retargeting is the PPC secret weapon most car dealerships don’t take advantage of. Using this strategy can make the difference between a one-time curious visitor and a buyer ready to schedule a test drive. If you’re spending money on clicks without retargeting your visitors, you’re wasting your ad spend.
At PPC.co, we specialize in high-performance white label PPC campaigns that include smart retargeting from day one. Whether you’re launching your first campaign or looking to tighten up your existing ad strategy, we can help you capture more leads, drive more traffic, and move cars off your lot. Let’s turn those clicks into closed deals – contact us now to get started.
