Your Google Ad campaigns just got a whole lot smarter with...drumroll please...smart
bidding!
I’m not being over dramatic.
It’s definitely something to get excited about.
Stay tuned to learn what smart bidding is and how it can help optimize your Google Ads
campaigns.
What is smart bidding?
Smart bidding is a digital advertising tool from Google Ads that uses machine learning
and campaign and user data to optimize your ad campaigns so you can meet your business
goals.
With smart bidding, you choose a bidding strategy specifically designed to achieve your business
goals and get the best return-on-investment for your strategy.
One study said that digital marketers spend 80% of their time on manual bidding, and 20%
actually strategizing.
With smart bidding, you’re cutting out the manual bidding and giving yourself more time
to work on an effective strategy for your business.
As your ad campaign runs, Google learns more about it and can make adjustments in real-time
as needed based on the goals you set.
So if your goal is to get people to make a purchase from your ad, you can use smart bidding
to get as many purchases as possible for your budget.
Smart bidding vs. manual bidding
Smart bidding is automated.
So, unlike manual bidding, once it’s set up, smart bidding will look at different signals
from users, like their device and language, along with any campaign data, and make the
bidding decisions for you.
In the old days of manual bidding, you had to adjust bids based on your own research.
Once you did your research and placed your bid, you had to manually monitor your campaign’s
performance and look for ways to increase its effectiveness.
You would be responsible for making adjustments to your campaign so that it gets you results—all
while trying to stay under budget.
And balancing the other responsibilities of your business.
Not to mention, it’s likely that you’ll be running multiple campaigns at once, so
you’d have to repeat the process for however many campaigns you want to run.
With smart bidding, you don’t spend hours trying to fine tune bids for your ads.
You set goals for your campaigns and let Google Ads make the best of your investment.
How do you set up smart bidding?
You set up smart bidding in your Google Ads account.
You should also make sure you have conversion tracking set up for your account.
There are a number of different smart bidding strategies to choose from, and I’ll explain
a few of them.
Target cost-per-action or target CPA lets you choose how much you think a conversion
is worth.
Once you set the target CPA with smart bidding, Google Ads will use its data to make the best
bids to achieve that goal.
Similarly, with target return on ad spend or target ROAS you tell Google Ads what you
want your return on ad spend to be, and then it works to get you the best results for your
goal.
Both target CPA and target ROAS require you to have a specific number in mind.
If you don’t have a specific goal in mind, you can choose to maximize conversions or
conversion value with your smart bidding strategy.
Maximize conversions aims to convert as many people as possible with your given budget.
With Maximize conversion value, you tell Google Ads that you want the best value for your
business from your campaigns, and you want it within your budget.
The value depends on overall goals for your business, like revenue or profit margin.
Let’s look at a smart bidding example.
You run an ecommerce business that sells watches.
You’ve done some math and determined that you have a target CPA of $4.
So you can enter that into Google Ads when setting up a smart bidding strategy.
Now let’s switch it up a bit.
Maybe your watch business is running a digital ad campaign for the first time and doesn’t
have any specific conversion benchmarks.
You just have the goal of getting people to buy a watch after seeing your ad.
So, instead of entering the cost-per-action or ROAS, you choose to maximize conversions.
Google will take a lot of different signals and put them together to form the best and
smartest bid strategy so you can convert searchers to customers.
Why should you use smart bidding for your business?
Have you heard the phrase, “work smarter, not harder?”
Well, that’s what smart bidding helps you do.
You don’t have to set bids manually for every keyword you want to target and hope
to get great value.
You just have to know your business goals and let Google Ads do the bidding for you.
You’re using your business’s resources efficiently, and you have the data to prove
it.
Are you using smart bidding with your Google Ads campaigns?
Let us know what you think in the comments!
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for the latest in digital marketing.
See you next time!