Without a doubt, Google made many exciting announcements this week at Google Marketing Live. Innovations in ad formats, further use of AI and increasing data transparency were the talk of the town at Moscone Center. But perhaps the announcements we were most excited by are those that give us more control over Google’s smart bidding algorithm.
Launched in 2016, Smart Bidding has grown up quite a bit especially over the last year. Smart bidding takes into consideration over 13 signals for search campaigns, including ad characteristics, time of day, audiences, browser, and operating system. The amount of levers the Smart Bidding algorithm has is much more than what is available to marketers when campaigns are on manual bidding. Using Smart Bidding, we’ve seen cost/conversion improve anywhere from 15-50% when campaigns are migrated over to tCPA or tROAS bid strategies.
But a few problems have prevented us from taking complete advantage of these strategies for some clients.