A bid that you set to determine the highest amount that you're willing to pay for a click on your ad.
- If someone clicks your ad, that click won't cost you more than the maximum cost-per-click bid (or "max. CPC") that you set. For example, if you set a $2 max. CPC bid, you'll never pay more than $2 for each click on your ad. The actual amount that you pay is called the actual CPC and is shown in your account's "Avg. CPC" column.
- A higher bid generally helps your ad show in a higher ad position on the page.
- You'll choose between "manual bidding" (you choose your bid amounts) and "automatic bidding" (you set a target daily budget and your max is automatically adjusted. CPC bids on your behalf, with the goal of getting you the most clicks possible within that budget). With manual bidding, you'll set one maximum CPC bid for an entire ad group, but can also set different bids for individual keywords.
You can change the max CPC for a biddable item (intraday bidding) by changing the value in the column. If you're already overriding the ad group's max CPC, you can return to inheriting from the ad group by removing the value from this column. Search Ads 360 will replace it with the inherited value.
If the biddable item is managed by an intraday bid strategy:
- The bid strategy automatically sets the value in this column.
- The bid strategy evaluates the max CPC multiple times a day and may adjust this value as high as the biddable item's max bid setting and as low as the biddable item's min bid setting.
- You can override the bid strategy's bid by changing the value in this column.