The past blog post served to briefly explain how your bid affects bid amount, how bid affects Google auctions, and what bidding options are and how they are managed. Today we will explain in more detail the automatic bidding.
How does automatic bidding work?
Automatic bidding will do a great deal of work for you, but before choosing it, you need to check for clear campaign goals. In addition, automatic bidding uses past campaign performance data to improve their performance, hence, the performance of the campaign will provide better automatic bidding.
In an auto bidding, keywords determine which search terms will be triggered on ads. With it, Google automatically increases bid, for example, an impression it thinks it will be more successful than the other.
An automatic bid is not for everyone and for each campaign type. When choosing an automatic bid strategy, it’s important to consider campaign goals. This can be an ad click, revenue increase, any chosen action on the website. Whether it’s the right choice depends on several items:
Are campaign goals clearly set – for example, bringing as many visitors to the website as possible?
How much time you’re willing to spend to optimize your campaigns – Google says that 80% of work time on a particular campaign is “spitting” on manual optimization of your campaigns;
Are campaigns eligible to the automatic bidding – Automatic bid will work better if your campaign already has some results like clicks and conversions. Such data is not necessary, but by using them, Google algorithm determines how to bid for individual items, and hence is a better chance that performance will be better with existing campaign performance data;
Do you have conversion tracking set up – The reason is just the paragraph before.
Automatic conversion-related bid strategies
Enhanced cost-per-click (eCPC) – a semi-automatic bid strategy that sets bids to reach as many conversions as possible within the daily budget. A bid is set for keywords, while the rest is part of the Google Ads system. Recommended for users who want to increase the number of conversions and have control over keyword bids at the same time.
Maximize conversions – Automatically sets bids at the time the auction is triggered to achieve as many conversions as possible within the budget set. Recommended for campaigns that already have a minimum of 15 conversions per month, and they do not have a target CPA selected – because the advertiser is not sure how much it should be.
Target CPA (cost-per-acquisition) – Automatically sets bids to bring as much conversion as possible to the CPA that is defined. It is recommended for advertisers who know how willing they are to pay per conversion.
Best practice when using automatic bidding
Launch it after manual bidding is used – as we mentioned earlier, the automatic bidding algorithm works better if there are some previous campaign performance data.
Keep track of conversions – without conversion tracking, these bidding methods drop into the water – but who does not track conversions today?
Avoid frequent changes to bidding options – Google’s algorithm takes some time to adapt to changes, according to the latest information about 14 days to see the impact of change;
Check campaign functionality and make positive changes
When to use manual bidding?
If it is considered that automatic bidding will not bring too much benefit, manual bidding is always an option. A positive thing about manual bid is 100% control over the height of an individual bid.
And finally, the decision to use automatic or manual bidding is up to you. We, although we have explained in more detail the methods and options of automatic bidding, we prefer manually. For many reasons, we will list the most important – however, we like to have things under his control 🙂