Automated bidding helps you meet your performance goals by using information about a bid’s performance to inform future bids. Each type of automated bid strategy is designed to help you achieve a specific target for your business. Search Ads 360 uses advanced machine learning to automate the process of setting bids across some of the supported advertising platforms for your advertising targets.
Bid strategies focus on maximizing performance of the portfolio as a whole, which can help you achieve the following:
- You'll get the best results if you create portfolios that share a business goal, such as campaigns in the same line of business, with similar margins, or with similar historical performance.
- You may see increased bids for stronger performing biddable items. In other cases, you may see increased bids for lesser performing biddable items when such an increase is likely to improve overall performance.
Most Search Ads 360 bid strategies and budget bid strategies can be applied to campaigns in different client accounts. The portfolio can include campaigns from Microsoft Advertising, Google Ads, Yahoo! JAPAN Ads, and Baidu.
Search Ads 360 bid adjustments can be applied to the following campaign types:
- Google Ads, Microsoft Advertising, Yahoo! JAPAN Ads, and Baidu Search campaigns
- Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising shopping campaigns
- Google Ads Performance Max campaign
- Google Ads, Microsoft Advertising, and Yahoo! JAPAN Ads Dynamic Search Ad campaigns
How portfolio bidding works
Portfolio bidding calculates bids and targets for all your campaigns to create an overall portfolio target. Portfolio bidding accounts for different portfolio segments to optimize overall campaign performance and can help increase ROI.
Keep in mind that individual campaigns or specific segments may not reach the same ROI or campaign spend. For example, some might have a lower CPA while others might have a higher CPA, with the total portfolio achieving the target CPA. Portfolio bidding makes adjustments to balance out these different segments to maximize the total portfolio performance.
Say you’re using portfolio bidding and your target CPA is set to $10 USD. If one of your campaigns achieves 20 conversions, but another of your campaigns has a lower performance and achieves only 8 conversions. In the above example Search Ads 360 will increase spend for the campaign with a better conversion rate, and reduce spend on the campaign with a lower conversion rate.
To do this Search Ads 360 may increase the target CPA (or keyword bids) for the first campaign (to $12 USD, for example), and lower the CPA target (or keyword bids) on the second campaign (to $8 SD, for example)
This will maximize performance of your total portfolio and help you get as many conversions as possible for the overall portfolio target of $10 USD.
Portfolio bid strategies will also make adjustments to bids and campaign targets if the bid strategy doesn’t perform as expected so that your campaign reaches your portfolio target more quickly. These settings may look different when shown in publisher advertising platforms, depending on whether you’re viewing the Campaign target or bid, or the portfolio goal.
Note: For Performance Max and Shopping campaigns, campaign-level targets can be set directly in the publisher account. This may appear different in the publisher account compared to Search Ads 360, because Search Ads 360 displays the portfolio-level target.
History and predictable trends
To determine the optimal bids, bid strategies use the performance history of biddable items from the campaign’s selected conversion goals and offline conversions.
Budget bid strategies use the campaign’s budgets as well as the performance history of biddable items to optimize performance.
When a bid strategy adjusts bids or a budget bid strategy adjusts bids and budgets, it monitors the impact of the changes and then makes small, incremental adjustments as needed. Bid and budget strategies avoid making abrupt, large changes, since that makes it more difficult to predict the outcome.
Auction time bidding sets a bid at the time of auction while intraday bidding sets a bid every six hours. Bids can only be adjusted for intraday bid strategies, in the supported bid strategy types. Budgets can be overridden for both intraday and auction-time bidding bid strategies. If you are using auction time bidding, then client account bidding will layer on additional query time signals to maximize performance.
Note: A bid strategy that uses offline conversions may stop adjusting the default bid of biddable items if offline conversion data isn’t uploaded regularly.
If a bid or budget bid strategy detects predictable trends (such as recurring patterns on weekends), it can adjust bids or budgets to take advantage of the peaks and troughs within the trends. The stronger the trend, the more confident the automated strategy can be in making slightly more aggressive changes.
This type of predictive bidding requires ample historical data. As such, you will need a sufficient number of clicks and conversions for a bid or budget bid strategy to take effect.
Effects of pausing bid strategy
Search Ads 360 uses portfolio bid strategies which aim to hit your target ROAS across your whole portfolio, not just individual keywords or campaigns. Search Ads 360 uses advanced machine learning and a wide range of contextual signals which means bid strategies are always learning and aim to hit your target over time. Bid strategies will respond to data and trends in your accounts.
Boost low-performing keywords and product groups
Some low-performing, long-tail keywords or product groups don’t receive enough traffic to accurately predict performance. Without any intervention, these biddable items can get bids that are so low as to fall off the page and receive no traffic at all. For intraday bid strategies, Search Ads 360 will automatically try to get at least a minimal amount of traffic for these keywords or product groups by setting a bid to give them a second chance to gain traffic.
For a biddable item that hasn't been clicked in the past 60 days, bids will be increased each day until the item is clicked if the bid strategy isn't budget constrained.