How to combat CPC being significantly over the bid we have set in MSFT shopping ads?

Hi Ashley_123A,

Thanks for reaching out to Microsoft Advertising Community Forum!

Monitoring and managing your CPC relative to your bid is essential for effective budget management and campaign in the advertising marketplace. Microsoft Advertising automated bid strategies ensure that your campaign is bidding effectively and automatically.

With Enhanced CPC, Microsoft Advertising automatically adjusts your bids in real time to increase your chances for a conversion. Your bid will go higher on searches that are more likely to convert and lower on searches less likely to convert (up or down, this change will be made after we apply any bid adjustments you have set). Over the long haul, though, we will try to make sure that your average CPC is not higher than your bid.

Enhanced CPC should reduce the cost per conversion and increase the total conversion count while respecting the campaigns current budget.

• For the best results, we strongly recommend using Enhanced CPC in conjunction with conversion tracking (a UET tag and a conversion goal).

If you recognize that the average (avg) CPC is higher than bid, there could be several reasons and steps we can take to ensure that you get the optimal performance.

1. Review and adjust your bidding strategy: Evaluate your current bidding strategy and make sure it aligns with your goals. View available bid strategies here.
2. Review your targeting: Ensure your ads are reaching the right audience. Evaluate your targeting options, such as location, demographics, and device targeting. Refining your targeting can help reduce irrelevant clicks and lower CPC. Visit How to target my customers by adjusting my bids for more information.
3. Monitor campaign regularly: For Shopping Ads campaign performance you can analyze metrics like impressions, clicks, conversions, and CPC. If you notice significantly high CPC, make necessary adjustments to bids, targeting, or ad optimizations.
4. You may try Ad schedule feature: Identify perfect times to your target audience. Use ad scheduling to show your ads during these selected time periods, which can help increase click-through rates and potentially lower CPC.
5. Consider adding negative keywords: Search terms report help identify irrelevant or low-performing search queries. You can easily add these terms as negative keywords to prevent your ads from being triggered by them, thereby reducing irrelevant clicks and lower CPC. For complete guide check out this page to Learn about using negative keywords to get to the right customers (microsoft.com).

To better assist I'll be happy to schedule a follow up consultation and share tips to get the most of ROI optimization for your Shopping ad campaign. Please check your Private Message and feel free to reply for further assistance.

Thank you,

Margarita | Microsoft Advertising Support Specialist | 800-518-5689

After checking through every campaign I see that the campaign I wrote about below was brought over from Google last night. When I gave Microsoft the OK to bring it over they went ahead and opened the bidding on the 2 ad groups copied over and just went to town.

In the past few months, we've noticed that the cpcs in our shopping ad campaigns are significantly over the bid we have set (2-5x over). This is across various product groups and campaigns to varying degrees. This is not as a result of any contributing bid modifiers we have set. We are currently utilizing the enhancedCPC bid strategy which states "Over the long haul, we will try to make sure that your average CPC is not higher than your bid" so we know there is potential for the actual CPC to go over our bid set, however in the past few months it has been extreme. Has anyone else noticed this trend? Are there any possible ops to prevent cpcs from doing this without being reactive? Were there any updates that caused this issue to spike in recent months?

I have the same problem...and as recently as today. Normally on 1 campaign I get 15 clicks per day. Today, I have 57 clicks since midnight and not 1 order BUT the CPC all went over $1 as I increased my budget.

The bounce rate is up. The time spent on the website is now 0 to 10 seconds. Needless to say that if you give them the opportunity, like I just did, they will take it.