bids so how do bids work well like I said many times this when you’re doing paid traffic you are in an auction you’re in a marketplace you’re basically you know shouting over the next person that you’re willing to spend however much you’re willing to spend per click obviously this all happens automatically through the software but you’re that’s what you’re doing you’re auctioning so each bidder on each keyword puts their highest cost per click that they’re willing to pay what are their what are they willing to pay per click and that’s how the whole system works that’s how the auction works there are a lot of different factors but basically the higher you bid the higher average position you’ll get and the more often you will win the bid you can bid differently on every single keyword which is actually really important to strategy that we talked about in the more advanced parts of the course your bid is very important because it determines whether you win the game of paid traffic or not like we talked about earlier we’re not doing brand advertising we’re not just spending as much money as we can to get as many impressions as we can we’re trying to get specific results for our advertising dollar so our bid is very very important you will not ever spend more than your maximum bid now that’s just you know if you’re in an auction and you say I’m willing to spend $300 on this thing and you know and you win they’re not gonna say okay now you owe us $900 that’s not how an auction works so just remember this is an auction and if you say that you’re willing to spend up to $30.00 that means that if you’re willing to spend up to 30 cents a click that means that you’ll never spend more than 30 cents click now there is a weird exception to this which is that lately they’ve rolled out a new feature called enhanced cost per click we means that based on their algorithms they’re you know automated tracking systems they may spend more than what your maximum bid is if they if they think that it’s very likely that that person will convert so that’s kind of the way advertising is going but as of right now you can still start with just a manual bid and if you do that then your bid will never go over your maximum bid many times you’ll get a much smaller bid if the keyword is not as competitive another thing to keep in mind with bids is that there is sort of a natural logic to the value of keywords I mean there are more valuable keywords because of something that we’ll talk about in the next section called buyer intent which is very important in almost all stages of doing paid traffic but just know that you know you’re the the grooves of human behavior have been carved out long ago so if you think a certain keyword is more valuable it’s very likely that it is more valuable because other people are thinking the same if you are a dentist and your competitor is competing with you or just you know your competitors buying ads for you know local dentists clients then very likely that he’s willing to spend almost anything to get that client because each client’s worth you know tens of thousands of dollars or thousands or whatever so he might be willing to spend up to $100 a click to get a single client so when you come to the auction you know those keywords are going to be very valuable so you’re probably gonna have to pay somewhere close to what what your competitors are paying so anyways we’ll talk a lot more about buyer intent but there is a natural logic to the value of keywords it’s not just sort of random it’s all based on supply and demand you’ll need to bid higher in some niches for some keywords again based on this natural logic of human behavior we’ll talk more about that I know so another thing with bids is that there are such things in the platform called bid modifiers basically what those are are they’re they are a way to as a broad stroke increase or decrease your bids based on certain factors so for an example you can say – 50 percent bid modifier on all impressions on mobile devices so if you find that your mobile you know your conversions on mobile devices are about twice what they are on computers and desktops then you could add a negative 50 percent bid modifier to drop you know all mobile bids are just going to be 50 percent less than what your normal bid for that keyword is so it’s like a blanket modify meaning it modifies so it comes at the beginning of the equation basically so if your normal scent if your normal bid for a keyword is 30 cents but you have a – 50 percent bid on mobile devices then instead of your max bid for mobile being 30 cents it’s gonna be 15 cents yeah that makes sense so there’s just another tool in the tool set we’ll talk about it more later as a more advanced thing but just know that it’s there you can modify bids for for geographic regions you know some cities or zip codes or states or countries you can modify them for devices which is probably the most common so how can you see your bid how do you know what your bidding you can set campaign ad group or keyword level bids you can see your max cost per click bid on each keyword in the keyword tab in the Bing dashboard so what if you bid too low well basically if you bid too low then you won’t receive any impressions or you’ll have very low impressions and you know very handy Bing will tell you about this basically they want you to spend money so they’re gonna tell you what they can reasonably offer you as far as bids go and they’re not in my experience there pretty they’re honest they don’t really have to like you know convince anybody of anything they they own a platform that’s extremely valuable they’re the real estate of these bids is very valuable so they’re pretty honest with you on you know what it’s going to take to get your ads where you want them to be there are estimated bids which is actually a metric you can look at which I’ll show you in a later part but Bing tells you what they estimate you will need to be if you want to get your ads on page one more consistently or at the top of the search engine result page more consistently however do not take these completely to heart they are trying to foster competition between bidders so while they are you know fairly honest with their pricing they’re also trying to get everybody to you know bid higher basically they make more money so they’re always gonna gently encourage you they’re not they don’t gouge you they’re not you know they’re not trying to like fool you at all they’re just gently you know urging you they’re gently nudging you to spend a little more basically so well sometimes this is good information beings platform will always advise you to simply spend a little bit more but playing bings game of bidding more will not always help you win will not always help where did this weirdly but will not always help you win your game of spending less than you make back