Before using a Smart Bidding strategy, you’ll want to determine your overall goal. The goal that you choose determines the Smart Bidding strategy for your display campaign.
Step 1: Choose the best Smart Bidding strategy
Use the flowchart to help you find a Smart Bidding strategy that's best for your business.
Step 2: Ensure that conversion tracking is set up properly
You don’t need to set up conversion tracking for Maximise conversions or ECPC (though you may get the best performance if you do so).
Smart Bidding relies on conversion tracking data as it learns and optimises your campaigns. Smart Bidding can bid towards conversions from Google Ads, Google Analytics (if you imported conversions into Google Ads) and offline conversion imports.
If the conversion tracking data is inaccurate, you may see fluctuations in your volume, CPA or ROAS. Smart Bidding can react and adjust to inaccurate conversion tracking data.
If you’re using third-party conversion tracking tools, make sure that you compare the conversion volume in those tools with your conversion volume in Google Ads reporting and note any differences before calculating your target CPA or target ROAS.
Step 3: Set your bidding targets
Start with Maximise conversions, target CPA or ECPC immediately so that our programmatic bidding algorithm can bid based on conversion likelihood from the start.
If you want to use target ROAS bidding, start with Maximise conversions or target CPA, and then switch to target ROAS bidding when you have enough conversions. You typically need a minimum of at least 15 conversions in a 30-day period, but some advertisers with relevant historical data may be eligible sooner.
Important information about choosing bid strategies
While you can start with target CPA and switch to target ROAS quickly, it’s hard to measure ROI and performance with low conversion volume. If you are sensitive to consistently hitting your target over a 30 day period using Google AI, we recommend driving at least 30 conversions per month, per ad group.
Start with targets that align with your historical CPA or ROAS when accounting for conversion lag (the time between clicks and conversions). To get the historical CPA or ROAS, view your most recent campaign performance in the last 30 days (adjust for conversion delay) and look at the average CPA or ROAS across display campaigns. If the current performance differs significantly from your target, the algorithm may lower bids and your total volume may decrease. To regain volume, you can increase your CPA, lower your ROAS goal or expand targeting. If efficiency is more important, you can continue using your current target but remember to assess volume using the conversion volume chart.
If enabling target CPA in a campaign with no conversion history, we recommend using your CPA from other display campaigns and/or using your business goals to inform the ideal CPA. You can then explore the CPA or volume tradeoff by raising or lowering your CPA target (similar to how you would raise your CPC in ECPC). Once the campaign gains enough data on the target CPA, you can use our bid simulator to further explore CPA and volume tradeoffs.
Wait at least two weeks without changes for the initial learning period. Performance may be more volatile during this time as the algorithm makes optimisation decisions. You can see if a campaign is in learning mode by looking in the campaign status column.
Step 4: Optimise your campaign settings
Budget
Smart Bidding performs best with a budget not limited by spend. Budget constraints can hinder performance, as the campaign isn't able to participate in auctions that may be highly likely to drive a conversion. Consider using Maximise conversions if you’re budget constrained.
Frequency caps
Remove any frequency caps as they can prevent your campaigns from appearing in auctions with a high likelihood of converting. Smart Bidding determines the campaign’s likelihood of getting conversions, which makes it unnecessary to set a frequency cap.
Bidding strategy
Depending on your bidding strategy, you can choose to pay for clicks, pay for conversions or pay for viewable impressions. If you’re using target CPA, choose to pay for conversions to reduce any fluctuations in target CPA.
Bid adjustments
You should avoid bid adjustments, as Smart Bidding strategies set bids to optimise for your conversion goals. Instead, make sure to optimise for a relevant conversion event (with an optimal conversion value) and follow the bidding and budget best practices mentioned in this guide.
Step 5: Segment your ad groups
Only segment your ad groups when necessary. Smart Bidding performs best when allowed to evaluate performance and optimise bids across as much traffic as possible. Segmenting many ad groups is discouraged unless there's a compelling business reason to do so.
Here are the situations where you should segment your ad groups:
- Assign different conversion values to user attributes: If you report conversion value and use target ROAS, Smart Bidding optimises to deliver higher value conversions in line with your ROAS goal. If you don't report conversion value but you know some conversions are more valuable than others, then you should use target CPA and segment the ad groups.
- Show different creatives: For instance, show a brand-focused creative to an upper-funnel user and a direct response creative to a lower-funnel user.
- Identify specific insights the algorithm won’t know: For instance, if you know time-to-departure is an important statistic, use this metric to segment ad groups. Create one ad group targeting only users whose departures are imminent and another for users with trips farther in the future and tailor creative messaging accordingly. Another common use case is segmenting for offline metrics or customer lifetime value.
- Get additional insight or reporting: You should create a new ad group when you want to split reporting between targeting or creative groupings. When you have two separate ad groups, you’ll receive statistics for each ad group on a separate line item in the 'Ad groups' report.
- Value new users and existing users differently: Many advertisers set a higher CPA and lower ROAS target for new users.
- See attribution discrepancies for different segments based on third-party reporting: For instance, if Google Ads reports 50% more conversions than a third-party reporting tool for your keyword-targeted campaign, but only 20% more conversions for in-market segments, you should segment to account for this discrepancy.
Even if you segment ad groups, evaluate performance towards your goal at the campaign or account level rather than focusing on ad group fluctuations. Remember to consider conversion delays when evaluating performance.
