Why would you spend your precious time and money on manual bidding when you can perform it automatically?
The world of digital marketing is soaring high with a pool of opportunities, innovative methods, and robust techniques to stay ahead of the game. That’s the place where Google ads smart bidding fits into the scene to maximize conversions.
If you aren’t reaping its benefits for your brand marketing already, you should at its earliest.
Smart bidding enables your marketing team to adjust the bid value in real-time. Not only that, there are other significant benefits that we will uncloak through this blog.
Let’s start with the introduction of smart bidding.
According to Google, smart bidding is a group of Google ad’s smart bidding strategies. It uses machine learning algorithms to achieve pre-determined goals. Smart bidding incorporates historical data, like ad performance metrics, audience signals, etc., into the process. This fosters the algorithm bid in real-time.
Smart bidding helps to optimize the ad campaigns either to maximize the conversions quantity or the value. Also, it has a special feature called real-time bidding. This refers to setting the bid value in real time. Also, smart bidding offers a leveled-up bid value compared with the existing ones.
Different Types of Smart Bidding Strategies
If you want to incorporate Google Ads’ smart bidding in your marketing strategy, then you have a few choices. Increasing traffic or sales to your website is now easier with smart bidding types. Here you go:
1. Maximizing Clicks
The main purpose of this strategy is to increase site visits. With this, you can get the maximum of clicks for your campaigns. If you are new to Google ads and want to test the water, then this strategy would be great for you. Driving traffic to your website is an incredible idea, but you should ensure that you’re not wasting your resources on low-quality traffic.
If you land a new client and want to develop their ad campaigns for the first time, then this strategy would work for you. It will enable the marketing team to accumulate more data for the campaign before opting for a different strategy.
2. Maximizing Conversions
This smart bidding strategy is focused on targeting those who are more likely to convert. However, you need to choose whether you want to target CPA or cost per acquisition. Based on your budget, Google will maximize the conversions. If you want to acquire more customers, targeting CPA will fit into your bill. Moving forward, Google Ads will set maximum CPC bids to maximize the conversion value. Also, it will try to achieve an average return on ad spend equivalent to your target.
3. Targeting Return on Ad Spend
This bidding strategy enables you to get maximum conversion value at the ROAS you set. The bids will automatically optimize during the auction time, helping you to manage bids for each auction. Here, the algorithm forecasts the future conversions and associated values using reported conversion values.
4. Targeting Impression Share
The purpose of the impression share is to increase the visibility of your business website. Google will show your ads either on the top of the page or at the top of search results.
5 Benefits of Smart Bidding in Google Ads
Once you switch to automated bidding from manual one, you’re going to experience the following benefits-
1. Saves Your Precious Time
Manually adjusting the bids is time-consuming. If you run an e-commerce business and have lots of products to sell through your business website, then manual bids may produce unrealistic results. On that note, Google’s automated bidding will work like a piece of cake by automating the entire procedure. However, you need to adjust a few things manually to maximize the effectiveness of the campaign.
2. Improves Campaign Performance
Using automated bidding strategies will enable your marketing team to work cohesively without logging in manually and making enhancements. With smart bidding, you know that changes are taking place to bolster the campaign performance. In turn, you can put more effort into other marketing-related works to turn your brand into a success story.
3. Customize Campaigns
Based on your goals, you can customize your campaigns with the power of Google’s smart bidding. Set your goals, and Google will handle them accordingly to help you achieve them.
4. Predicts Bid Amount
Smart bidding utilizes the power of a machine learning algorithm to predict the bid amount. These algorithms accumulate data from the campaigns to predict the accurate bid amount.
5. Audience Signals to Optimize Bids
Google ad algorithm uses multiple audience signals in order to optimize the bids. These signals use a combination of multiple signals to influence the conversion rate.
Google Smart Bidding Best Practices
Incorporating smart bidding in your ad campaign will help you get the most out of the automation tool. To achieve optimal results in a stipulated time, you should follow the best practices. Here you go-
1. Set Marketing Objectives
You must define your business objectives to get better clarity. This can include various objectives like increasing conversions, improving ROI or maximizing the conversion value. Once you set clear objectives, it will enable you to choose the right bidding strategy aligned with your goals.
2. Allow Time to Accumulate Data
Google smart bidding uses a machine learning algorithm to optimize bids in real time. Therefore, you should allow Google to gather important data in order to adjust your strategies. This is time-consuming, and you must wait to get favorable results. If you make frequent changes, it may affect the normal working procedure of smart bidding.
3. Understand Target Audience
Assessing the behavior of your target audience plays a pivotal role in developing your marketing campaigns. Once you know whom you’re targeting, you can curate better campaign ideas that would bring value to the table.
4. Incorporate Valuable Conversions
To receive the maximum value of smart bidding, ensure that you have set up only those conversions that are valuable for your business. It may include contact forms, sales or any other action to represent the relevant campaign goal.
5. Check Attribution Model
The attribution model refers to how the ads, keywords, and campaigns connect to conversions. Bear in mind that the attribution model should support and reflect your goals.
6. Try Multiple Strategies
You can experiment with different bidding strategies to understand which one fits your bill. A/B tests can be useful for you as it will enable you to check the initial results. Based on that, you can hatch up your next steps.
7. Maintain a Consistent Account Structure
A clear and organized account structure plays a critical role in the success of your campaigns. Group the keywords and ads logically, which will reflect the products’ theme. Also, a clean structure will allow the marketing team to better assess the goals. Accordingly, they can make the adjustments.
8. Optimize Ads and Landing Pages
The performance of smart bidding depends on the quality of ads and landing pages. Ensure that the landing pages speak about the theme of your product/service and offer a good UX.
5 Tips for Smart Bidding to Help You Maximize the Efforts
To make the maximum from your automated Google ads bidding, we will share few tips to keep you ahead of the game. Here you go-
1. Adjust Your Bids
Managing your bids will enable you to fine-tune the same without much friction. For instance, if you want to appear in the ads in the evening, you can do it accordingly.
2. Follow Bidding Automation Rules
Once you start following the rules, it will be easier for the marketing team to manage the bids accordingly.
3. Implement Bidding Scripts
When you have biddings in bulk, then bidding scripts allow you to adjust the bids in bulk. It saves your precious time by manually changing the bids of each ad group or keyword. In turn, you can adjust multiple bids at one time.
4. Use Portfolio Bid Strategy
When you develop one bid strategy and apply it to several campaigns, then it’s known as portfolio bidding. You can manage multiple campaigns at once through this procedure. Additionally, you can allocate daily budgets while prioritizing campaigns at once.
5. Focus on Branded Keyword Bidding
This will help your brand to reach the target audience within a stipulated time. Therefore, it will reinforce your brand position in Google SERP results.
7 Steps to Implement Smart Bidding for the Campaigns
If you want to reap the benefits of automatic bidding, then you should ensure that you’re following the steps. It includes:
- First and foremost, login to your Google account. Now, visit the control panel to access campaign settings.
- Click “Campaign Settings” from the main menu. Now, select the “Bid Settings” section.
- Click on “Enable Smart Bidding” within the bidding section.
- Now, choose the bid type by clicking on “Change Bid Type”. It will help you to choose in between automatic or manual bidding.
- Choose “Automatic Bidding” to start the smart bidding procedure. Now, you will see the options with available targets that align with the business requirements. It includes “CPA Target,” “ROAS Target,” “Maximize Conversions Value,” “Maximize Conversions,” etc. Select the one that fits your business goals.
- Now, you need to adjust the additional settings, such as the desired ROAS value or cost per acquisition, that reflect your business goals.
- Finally, click on the “Save Changes” button. Now, the automated bidding will be applied to your campaign. This will maximize the bidding performance to achieve the goals.
How do You Know Which Smart Bidding Strategy You Should Use?
The answer is that it depends on your short- and long-term goals.
Your goals are most important while deciding on your bidding strategy. Therefore, you should decide what things are playing a pivotal role in your brand to get a nuanced approach to the present situation of your account.
If you want to generate more revenue for less spend, you should try ROAS bidding. Conversely, if you want to increase conversions and cost is not a concern, then you can try to maximize conversions.
Let’s PWA Media Help You!
We understand that choosing the right strategy is a daunting task. On top of that, if you’re not familiar with Google Ads’ smart bidding, then it could be overwhelming! At PWA Media, our dedicated marketing team will help you understand your business goals based on your priorities. Once you gauge the specific requirements for your brand, our team will propose a feasible smart bidding strategy.
To know the cost part and how it works, book a consultation call today. Choose the right strategy, and the success is all yours!
