I was surprised by just how drastic eCPC bidding underperformed CPC bidding. In my case ROI was 35% higher with CPC vs eCPC. I noticed that google does not record the change of bid type from CPC to eCPC in change history so it is harder to know when exactly you made changes and therefore harder to track the ROI impact.

I don’t want to get to conspiratorial sounding here so I will look into using Adwords Campaign Experiments to measure the difference in ROI, but at the end of the day that tool still relies on Google to be honest about the results.

What you’re essentially doing is building a CTR and historical campaign data rapidly. It’ll also give you a good idea as to how well your campaign does within that timeframe/geography. However, this will only work on keywords/ads where you actually have a strong chance of getting a decent CTR (>3%). Because if you compete on popular keywords and don’t actually get clicked on, what you’ll have left is a lot of impressions, few clicks, an embarassing CTR, and a CPC that made you blow through your entire daily budget with just a handful of clicks…So choose your keywords carefully (preferrably long-tail and model specific keywords).

The best way to sum this up, is pick a spot and own it. If it doesn’t work, pick another and own it. And so on… eventually, you’ll have enough impressions, clicks, q-score, and impression share that you can turn the campaign on nationally and 24/7 with whatever resources you have. Just don’t expect that you’ll appear very often if you’re competing on popular keywords amongst large brands.

Good luck;)