Google Smart Bidding Updates You Don’t Want to Miss

by Andrea Taylor | Sep 9, 2019 | AAA Needs Updating, Google Ads | 0 comments

Over the last year, Google has rolled out some updates and new features in regards to smart bidding. In August 2018, Google started automatically opting campaigns into eCPC bidding. Then in November 2018, Target Impression Share Bidding was introduced.

Here are two updates with Google’s Smart Bidding features you may have missed.

New Bidding Strategy: Maximize Conversion Value

At this year’s Google Marketing Live, a new smart bidding strategy was introduced: Maximize Conversion Value. This bidding strategy aims to maximize the value of your campaign within your specified budget.

Conversion Tracking

Before getting started using this bidding strategy, you’ll need to do a little additional setup.

In addition to having conversion tracking in place, you’ll also need to be able to track transaction-specific conversion values. Follow the instructions here to set up different values for each conversion.

Once that is completed, you may need to modify your site tags. You’ll need to dynamically pass to the event snippet the value of the conversion as well as currency by setting a value and currency parameter.

We won’t get into all of that, but the help article linked above has plenty of instructions on the details there.

You can select this bidding strategy in campaign settings under Bidding.

We hope to test this bidding strategy out soon and report back on its performance.

Seasonality Adjustments for Smart Bidding

This feature was just announced on Wednesday, August 28.

For many advertisers, there are times of the year when their conversion rates vary. While Google says that smart bidding strategies like Target CPA and Target ROAS incorporate room for seasonality in the models already, there might be times that you need to account for larger-than-normal shifts in conversion rates.

Google says this adjustment is best for short term adjustments in intervals of 1-7 days. These adjustments are ideal for things like sales and promotions. It is not currently recommended to use these adjustments for greater than 14 days at a time.

How to Create a Seasonality Adjustment

These adjustments can be made in the Shared Library under Bid Strategies > Advanced Controls.

You can enter a name and description, set a start and end date (along with specific times of day), select which campaign types/specific campaigns/devices to apply the adjustments to and then enter an estimated increase or decrease in conversion rate that you expect to see.