In Google Ads (formerly AdWords), a bid represents the amount of money an advertiser is ready to pay for an ad. If you are advertising with Google Ads, your bid determines the place your ad will get if any. In essence, ad placement is like a lot on an auction – the higher the price you are willing to pay, the stronger the chance that you’ll get a deal.

If you’ve been using Google Keyword Planner, you must be familiar with the “Max CPC” parameter, which is essentially an alternative for a bid. However, the maximum possible value for this parameter in Keyword Planner’s interface is 100 (USD), while Google Ads API allows specifying a bid as high as 999 (USD).

Here at DataForSEO, we’re using Google Ads API as the data source for Google Keyword Data API. Accordingly, the maximum value for a bid in our system is also 999.

Note that the value you specify as a bid determines the prices and positions you will get in the results. In other words, the higher value you specify as a bid, the higher estimates our API will return for positions and prices.

Worth pointing out, the results you get with our API through Google Ads might differ from the estimates you see in Google Keyword Planner. The thing is, GKP data is account-specific, and the results depend on the user’s ad history, past and existing creatives, and other factors. To level these factors, we recommend specifying high bids.