Value based bidding for Video action campaigns

In the coming months the ability to create new Video Action Campaigns will be removed. We recommend using Demand Gen as an alternative to Video Action Campaigns. Remaining Video Action Campaigns will automatically be upgraded to Demand Gen in Q2 2025. Affected advertisers will be notified as that transition approaches.

Value based bidding (VBB) enables you to maximize the total value of conversions generated by your Video action campaign. Value bidding comes with two bidding strategies: Max conversion value and target ROAS (tROAS).

Video action campaigns with Max conversion value bidding allows you to maximize the total conversion value of your campaign within a specified budget. You can define the value that you want to maximize, such as sales revenue or profit margins, when you set up conversion tracking for your account.
Video action campaigns with tROAS bidding lets you tap into value based bidding by setting a tROAS for your campaign. Video action campaigns will then look to acquire users who are likely to have this set return within the selected conversion window you have indicated.

Benefits

Optimize your bids to achieve more value rather than more conversions.
Enables direct optimization for sales conversion events.
If you’ve a product feed with diverse prices or shopping cart sizes that drastically vary, bids will adjust based on the value driven by a specific conversion.

When to use value bidding

Value-based bidding is most helpful if various conversions have different value for your business, or if you have a specific ROAS target that you're trying to achieve.

The table below can help you find out which bidding strategy is best for your campaign.

	Max conversions	Target CPA	Max conversion value	Target ROAS
Goal	Maximize conversions for budget	Maximize conversions within tCPA	Maximize conversion values for budget	Maximize conversions within your tROAS
When	Priority is to spend the budget. No specific ROI target. Conversions optimized for have similar values for your business.	Specific ROI target. Conversions optimized for have similar values for your business.	Priority is to spend the budget. Conversions have different value for your business. No specific ROI target.	Specific ROI target. Conversions optimized for different values for your business.

Before you begin

You'll need to start your video action campaign with target cost-per-action (tCPA) or Max conversions, and then upgrade the campaign to tROAS or Max conversion value. If you want to use tROAS, start your campaign as tCPA first. If you want to use Max conversion value, start your campaign with max conversions first.
You must have at least 30 conversions from the previous 30 days.

Example: If you get to 30 conversions in the past 5 days, then you can switch over to tROAS or MCV. If you have 30 conversions from a campaign that ran a year ago, it would not be eligible.

Use Google Ads conversion tracking with conversion values. Learn more about Track transaction-specific conversion values
We recommend that you don’t make any bid or creative changes for the first 14 days of the campaign in order to ensure stable model training for Google AI.

Best practices

Keep your campaign unchanged in the first 14 days after you switch to value bidding.
Including more than one conversion type will complicate your ROAS evaluation and will be harder to handle for learning data.
Set your conversion window as you see fit, but don't change it throughout campaign testing if not urgently needed.
Use the bid strategy report to evaluate performance.
Set tROAS 20% lower than your historical avg. ROAS to initially kickstart your campaign.
Follow best practices for VAC set up.

Tip:

To determine which ROAS you should set, review the campaign's ROAS (Conv. value / cost) over the previous month and use that as your benchmark. We recommend setting a lower than required ROAS to allow the campaign time to ramp up and adjust to the bidding method change.

For example, if the campaign delivered a ROAS of 500% (conv. value / cost = 5), set the Target ROAS to 400% to give the campaign some room to adjust to the bidding strategy change.

Instructions

Select an existing Video action campaign using tCPA or MaxConversion. Verify that it has collected 30 conversions in the last 30 days.
- If you don’t have an existing campaign, create a new Video action campaign using tCPA or MaxConversion bidding strategy.
Select your bid strategy in the "Bidding" page.
If you’ve selected tROAS as your bidding strategy, enter your preferred tROAS.
- Note: Your initial tROAS goal should not be higher than your historical ROAS achieved within the set conversion window (we actually recommend you set it 20% lower to kickstart your campaign). Your target is what optimizes scale or campaign ROI.
Set your budget for MaxConversion value.
- Note: A tROAS target is not needed for Max Conversion value. Make sure that you’ve enough budget to acquire 10 conversions per day in your campaign to achieve optimal results. You can use your historical avg. CPA to set an accurate budget.
Evaluate your performance correctly. After your campaign is set up, you can evaluate your campaign performance by going to “Conversions” and clicking the box for Conv. value / cost.

Note: We recommend your campaign run for at least 3 weeks to provide the most accurate data. Account for your average conversion delay when evaluating your campaign. For example, if most of your conversions come in after 4 days, don't look at the past 4 days (exclude days from reporting) when evaluating your campaign performance.

Was this helpful?

How can we improve it?