Automated bid strategies

Powerful bid optimization

Automated bid strategies optimize your line item's bid based on the likelihood that:

An impression will lead to a chosen outcome (a click, conversion, view, etc.).
An impression is available at an optimal price (compared to the market).

Some variables that automated bid strategies use for prediction include inventory signals, audience lists, creative effectiveness, and line item strategies.

Use automated bidding

New line items are automatically defaulted to the appropriate automated bid strategy.
Go to Line item > Details to enable or disable automated bidding.
To optimize toward conversions (without historical data in Display & Video 360), opt into the enhanced automation pool.

Types of automated bid strategies

Maximize performance

Maximize KPI while prioritizing spending my full budget optimizes for the best performance for your chosen KPI. Flight dates must last 2 weeks for the entire budget to be spent. Your line item's bid will be raised until your budget can be spent or the line item's bid is capped by the Do not exceed average CPM of setting.
Maximize clicks or Maximize conversions, while prioritizing a target KPI optimizes for a specific performance goal. Meeting the line item's performance goal will take priority over spending your line item's budget. If your line item's goal is overly aggressive, the line item budget might not be spent.
Maximize installs (App install line items only) optimizes for app install performance for your budget, or for a target cost per install. You can also limit the average CPM.

(Optional) Limit the maximum average CPM

You can set a ceiling for the maximum average CPM that Display & Video 360 can bid in the "Do not exceed average CPM of ____" field.

Considerations

Not recommended for impression-based budgets, as they aren't based on currency and could potentially lead to overspending.
Not recommended if you must stay under an absolute maximum CPM at all times. While it may limit the line item's maximum average CPM over the line item's lifetime, average CPM may be exceeded at isolated points during its flight.
Maximum average CPM is calculated over a line item's entire history, whether or not automated bidding was enabled on the flight start date.

(Optional) Prioritize deals over open auction inventory

Prioritizing deals over open auction helps prioritize spend on the following targeted deals over spend performance:

Private auction deals: Adjusts your spend by increasing the bid price up to the deal’s floor price.
Preferred deals: Adjusts your spend by increasing the bid price up to the deal’s fixed price.

This helps increase the number of bids you could win towards your targeted deals, which the bid strategy could normally rule out if the calculated bid price is below the deal’s floor or fixed price. Your bids are also adjusted to minimize the likelihood of bidding on low quality inventory. This means that Display & Video 360 will raise the bid to the floor price for the impressions that have higher value, based on the bidding strategy, compared to other impressions. Impressions with higher value are favored more than open auction inventory. Therefore, you won't necessarily buy every impression available from the deals.

While this helps increase spend on your targeted deals, it may negatively affect the performance of automated bidding, such as when maximizing for clicks or conversions, because this option overrides the bidding strategy’s calculated bid price to increase bids on your targeted deals.

Example

Your bid strategy helps maximize performance by calculating a bid price per impression to make the most of your campaign budget. This means Display & Video 360 won’t bid on deals over the calculated bid price.

For example:

If you’ve targeted a preferred deal with a fixed price of $4 and your bid strategy calculates a bid price of $3, Display & Video 360 wouldn’t bid on the deal because it’s over the $3.

Choosing to prioritize deals over open auction inventory lets you bid up to the deal’s fixed price of $4.

Maximize brand

With the Maximize Brand, while prioritizing spending my full budget strategy, your line item's bid will be raised until your budget can be spent.

Maximize for:

Completed in-view and audible impressions (video only) to prioritize impressions where the video was visible at completion of the video and the audio was audible.
Impressions that were viewable for at least 10 seconds (video only) to prioritize impressions where the video was visible for 10 seconds or more.
Viewable impressions (display and video) to prioritize impressions where the display or video ad was viewable according to Active View.
- Use While prioritizing a target viewable CPM to optimize your bid based on the probability that an impression will be viewable (powered by Active View).

Advanced troubleshooting

Changes in volume / conversions

infographic for dealing with sudden changes to volume or conversion rate

Performance issues

For an accurate overview of automated bidding performance, ensure your insertion order optimization goal aligns with the chosen bidding strategy on your automated bidding line items.
If Apply advertiser floor price for targeted deals is applied, the algorithm raises bid prices to respect the deal floor, which may lead to overvaluing the deals inventory.
If While prioritizing spending my full budget strategy (recommended) is in use, the algorithm may raise bid prices to improve win rate (especially if market price is high). Consider the While prioritizing ;a target KPI strategy and set a target performance value; however, this may limit pacing.

Pacing issues

When average CPM is less than Market price (Chart 2):
- If Do not exceed average CPM is applied, average CPM may need to be adjusted to improve win rate.
- If using the While prioritizing a target KPI strategy, the target value may be too low compared to market price.
- Consider using the While prioritizing spending my full budget strategy. The bidder automatically adjusts targets to balance pacing and performance.

When unrelated to bids/auction, you may want to review suggestions, troubleshoot deals and line items, obtain creative Approval, check the Inventory Availability report, adjust targeting, or work with your publishers.

Limitations

The bidding algorithm can take up to 4 weeks to learn and calibrate before judging performance.
Using ActiveView based autobidding and viewability targeting at the same time may severely limit your ability to spend your budgets or reach your desired performance goal.
Specific KPI target values can lead to underspending (if too aggressive). In most cases, Maximize KPI while prioritizing spending the full budget will work best.
Prioritizing deals over open auction when maximizing for performance isn't available when using packages.
Drastic changes applied on LI level regarding CPM/CPC increase/decrease as well as expanding targeting may cause spike on spend while autobidding algorithm is in learning phase
Whenever you make a UI-related change in DV360, it can take up to 24 hours to take effect. There might be a data lag that may block spending. That would be attributed this to the autobidding strategy re-learning with the new budget applied. This is completely in-scope of how autobidding works when instituting changes to the budget, and you should expect lag when instituting new budget changes mid-way through a reserved flight.
Goal tCPM is treated as a guideline and it may exceed the original bid you set. The system will prioritize spend and completion of the ad sequence for LIs where it exists and may exceed original bid which should ideally strive to average around the tCPM that you set. From the Target CPM you set, we'll optimize bids to help get as much unique reach as possible. Some impressions may cost more or less than your target.

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