What is Smart Bidding in Google Ads and how do you use it?

Achieving conversions is one of the permanent goals of most companies. A great ally to complete the process is Smart Bidding. Nowadays, there are no excuses for not implementing your projects, since there are many strategies that can support you.

At this time it is important to achieve high visibility among consumers through SEO and SEM techniques. But it is necessary to go further so that you can achieve all those goals you set from the beginning.

To do this, you must work with a series of strategies that complement each other. And a good option to consider on the part of your company is Smart Bidding, which is why it is of great importance that you know about it.

Getting to know Smart Bidding better

But, what is Smart Bidding? This is a set of automatic bidding strategies used to obtain higher conversions, as well as to improve the value of these conversions in each auction. This is a practice that is increasingly used by Google Ads account managers.

Best of all, if you decide to employ this technique, a series of algorithms will take care of part of the tasks when scheduling campaigns. They can carry out operations to optimize results. Besides, they configure the automatic bids according to the performance objectives you have stipulated.

Identifying the Smart Bidding objective is simple: Google’s algorithm has to take over the bidding-related tasks to save time for the manager. It also gives Google Ads the possibility to study the auctions where the campaigns created are competing, and then determine those where there are more likely to generate a conversion.

Keep in mind that for Google Ads campaigns to be developed effectively, they must follow certain steps. For example, having well-structured campaigns and creating optimized ads about the keywords you want to position.

How can Smart Bidding be used correctly?

As you have seen, Smart Bidding can be of great help in your project. But it is also very important that you know the different ways to use it in your strategy:

• Improved cost per click (CPCM): this option has the purpose of automatically and autonomously adjusting the manual bids. It is based on the likelihood that the click will result in conversion on the website.
• Target ROAS: this works with the target ROAS that the individual has set, to increase revenue and conversions.
• Increase conversions: through this strategy, the target CPA bids are generated automatically to obtain the highest number of conversions that the campaign allows.

Advantages of Smart Bidding

Knowing the advantages offered by the set of Smart Bidding strategies is key for you to decide to use it. The positive aspects that you will find in the following list will make you see this technique with different eyes:

• It has automatic and advanced learning: the first benefit to highlight is that it provides you with automatic learning and advanced features. This is possible thanks to the algorithms with which it works, which make more concrete predictions. In this way, a smaller margin of error is obtained.
• Optimized positioning for search results: it allows you to be among the first places, surpassing your main competitor even deciding the percentage.
• Saves time: this system can take care of multiple operations. Therefore, it allows the manager to invest his time in other activities, and not to use it all on the campaign.
• Improved campaign performance: during this process, different variables are studied, thus allowing to refine the bids. In this way, it is possible to obtain an increase in clicks.
• A large number of signals: this set of strategies has a wide variety of signals, such as device or location. These give the possibility to optimize the auction to the maximum.
• Targeting: This is done based on interests and your attribution model, to optimize bids.
• Grant personalization: you can achieve this through performance limits according to device/targets.
• Provides transparent reporting: with these documents, you can get all the information related to bid performance. It also includes any problems that are occurring, which you can quickly correct.

Get the most out of Smart Bidding strategies

When considering introducing this concept in your work, it is also convenient to know the key aspects of Smart Bidding strategies that you can take advantage of:

1.- You can measure the value of actions on your website.

For you to take full advantage of automatic bidding strategies in Google Ads, you must do all the measurements in the right way. This way you can avoid that conversion tags are triggered where they shouldn’t be or duplicate conversions appear, for example.

You need to make sure that you are properly measuring your company’s value actions. That’s because Google Smart Bidding takes these things into account. Therefore, consider this type of data to optimize the bids of your campaigns.

2.- Create your campaigns properly

Keep in mind that Google’s automatic learning, as well as its algorithms, is focused on data volumes. Therefore, you cannot structure extremely complex and segmented campaigns to have the highest possible level of relevance.

Those CPC reductions that arise are rendered obsolete by segmenting the data into different ad groups and campaigns. Therefore, you must implement the new campaign automation approach, applying structuring methodologies that are simpler so that you can group a large amount of data under the same entity.

3.- Set your objectives and choose the ideal bidding strategy.

Having very clear objectives for your campaign will always be a key factor in any strategy, and in this case, it is no exception. And this goes hand in hand with choosing the ideal bidding strategy for your business. But if you don’t know where to start, there are several tips you can take as a guide:

• In case you want to increase your visibility to have a good positioning in keyword searches, you have to work with the target impression share method.
• For traffic generation or visits to your site, you can opt for the manual CPC bidding technique or maximize clicks.
• You also have the alternative of producing volume conversions on your website. To do so, you can use enhanced CPC or maximize conversions.
• If, on the other hand, you want to maximize the revenue or value of these conversions, you have the option to maximize the value of the conversions.
• Working on volume is of relevance but you should be guided by profitability or maximum cost-per-acquisition targets. So if you want to control these objectives, it is advisable to use target CPA or target ROAS.

4.- Work broad matches together with these strategies.

They say that “two heads think better than one”, and something similar happens when you combine or work together with different strategies. The idea is that you can have good control over the keyword matches you use in your campaigns.

Remember that users search in a more heterogeneous way every day. For this reason, it is advisable to apply, along with the use of automatic bidding strategies, the use of broad match keywords.

In this way, you give Google’s algorithm more freedom to act. This way it can decide when and how you bid on a particular search term to maximize results.

5.- You can upload your offline conversion information.

You can upload information about your conversions. This can be in campaigns oriented to lead acquisition or in cases where the sale takes place in an offline environment. The challenge lies in qualifying the leads from your acquisition campaigns.

But you can achieve the maximum qualification of your leads. To do this you need to upload offline conversion data into the system so that you can provide more relevant information to Google Smart Bidding. Such as the highest quality conversions and from which campaigns, ad groups, and keywords they come from.

This is how this system manages to prioritize those entities that provide the most value within the account. This is very beneficial for all the campaigns you undertake by implementing this set of strategies.

There is no doubt that it is an excellent option to apply the set of Smart Bidding strategies in your Google Ads campaigns. As you can see, the advantages it offers are many and of great help to increase your business conversions.

Article by Mike Ivars originally published at Adtuo.com on May 27, 2021.