I don’t know about you, but I’m tired. Juggling personal and work responsibilities while trying to stay healthy amid a dangerous global epidemic makes life a daily marathon. Are you, like me, looking for something that can help you successfully reach the finish line of this marathon? Today, we are all running our daily marathon and each of us has our ways of facing the many obstacles and challenges along the way. Many of these barrier-breaking strategies involve technology, and the same is true of marketing and advertising. In this article, we want to talk about a particular technology that can help your business compete more effectively in the Google Ads competition, namely Automated Bidding. In this article you will learn that:
- What is automated bidding, how does it work, and when is the best time to use it?
- What are the key benefits of using Google’s automated and intelligent budgeting capabilities?
- How WordStream Advisor’s new Optimize Bids Alert can help you implement these strategies in a meaningful way
Table of Contents
What is Automated Bidding?
Google’s automated Google Ads budgeting strategy not only takes the burden of bid management off your shoulders, but also helps you reach the finish line with monthly, quarterly, and annual KPIs. Before we jump into how these Google automation strategies will help you win the contest, let’s ease up a bit and prepare for the contest by addressing the basics.
Google Ads defines an automated bidding strategy as a bidding strategy that automatically bids for your ads based on the likelihood of getting a click or conversion. Each of the automatic bidding strategy models is designed in a way to help you achieve one of the specific goals of your business.
Common concerns about Google Ads Smart Bidding
The Google definition we mentioned above sounds great, right? Of course, some advertisers are still worried about giving up control of their ads to Google Ads. This is just one of the many concerns of businesses in using Google Ads’ automatic bidding. In the second part of the pre-race warm-up, we also see other common concerns and questions people have about this.
1- Can a program manage my Google Ads smart bidding?
Manually managing keyword suggestions is a tedious process. Evaluating the performance of your ads and keywords on an ongoing basis, deciding which areas to make adjustments, and then implementing this strategy is a full-time job in itself. As a task that seems difficult for a human to perform, it’s understandable that entrusting it to a computer, in general, can cause concern, but as you’ll see later in this article, a computer just happens to be able to. Identify and implement Google Ads budgeting adjustments like a human, that too in much less time.
2- Isn’t automatic Google Ads smart bidding a new thing?
There is a common misconception in the world that automated bidding is a new thing in the world of online advertising, when this is not true at all, and if we want to go back to where it started, we have to go back to 2010. Over more than 10 years, Google has taken the time to evaluate and perfect the algorithms behind auto-suggestions, with support from all of the many resources at its disposal. Therefore, it can be said that these algorithms are smart enough to know in which parts of the bid corrections should be made, and they can also perform these optimizations and deliver the right results in a much shorter period. About me and you.
3- Can smart bidding increase our conversion rate?
The short answer to this question is “yes”. A series of strategies for automating Google offers; Like maximizing clicks to increase website visits or targeting impression shares to increase exposure are not conversion-driven, but Google’s Smart Bidding is conversion-driven. This feature, which was released in 2016, is Google’s solution for conversion-oriented bidding. The strategies of this section include the following:
- Improved cost per click
- Maximize conversions
- Maximize conversion value
- CPA targeting
- Targeting rate of return on investment
Since the beginning of the work of this department, these smart offering strategies with many repetitions have been able to have the most intelligence and effectiveness to date due to the machine learning that gives them power.
4- What makes smart bidding so smart?
By understanding the main factors and indicators that these algorithms consider, we can understand how smart this Google automatic suggestion model is. According to Google Ads, Smart Bidding optimizes each auction based on conversion or conversion value, a process called auction-time bidding.
The machine learning behind these algorithms is computing data on a massive scale and at incredible speed, while also taking into account many parameters. Google Ads calls these parameters signals, which are identifiable details about a person or their content at a given time for each auction. Examples of these parameters include the following:
- The device used
- Physical location and favorite location
- Weekend and time of day
- User interface language
- browser
- operating system
- Demographics
- Product Features
Everything does not end here! Smart Google Ads budgeting can also optimize search bids based on the attribute model you’ve applied to your campaign. Trying to pinpoint the exact algorithm behind these smart automation strategies is almost impossible and something that can be left to the Googlers themselves, but I’m sure you’ve figured out by now that these algorithms know exactly what they’re doing. They give.
Is Google Ads smart bidding good for your business?
So far, we’ve covered and tried to answer some of the most common concerns about automated bidding, but you might still be unsure if it’s a winning strategy for your business.
Just like other pre-race warm-up tactics, some will set you up for success while others may make the race harder for you. For example, active stretching, shaking out your muscles, and making sure you’re hydrated are all good things to do before you race. On the other hand, eating a full English breakfast, staying up late the night before a race, and wearing jeans during a race are not good things to do!
Just like with contests, there are some dos and don’ts before applying automated bidding strategies to your Google Ads campaigns.
Google Ads’ automated smart bidding strategies may benefit your business if:
- You have conversion tracking
- Your campaigns are not limited to a specific budget
- Don’t be too narrow in your targeting
- Your desired performance metrics should not be too strict
- Have a good campaign structure with related ad groups
Automated bidding strategies may not work for you if:
- You don’t track your conversions
- You have a limited budget to work with
- You are targeting demographics, location, etc. too narrowly
- You expect the result by tomorrow
If you set yourself up for success from the start, you can see meaningful results in a short amount of time, work more productively, and meet the key performance indicators you’ve set.
Advantages of smart and automatic bidding
Well, so far we have addressed the common concerns about these strategies and the dos and don’ts of using them, and we have prepared and warmed up well before the start of the race. So far, we have understood what Google’s automation and smart bidding strategies are, how they work, and when is the best time to use them. Now we want to see what benefits they provide us.
1- More growth and achieving goals
The simplest and most basic application of automated and intelligent bidding is to generate the highest return on potential customers on your landing page. Some of these strategies send more traffic to your landing pages, while others increase the quality of that incoming traffic. Both can have many advantages, but ultimately, it all depends on your business goals. Implementing these bidding strategies will help you identify and take advantage of new opportunities, while your campaigns will experience a higher ROI.
2- Improve your Google Ads optimization score
Your optimization score is an estimate of how your Google Ads account is set up to work or perform. If your optimization score is 100%, it means your account is working at full capacity, so this is an important metric to check.
Google Ads offers suggestions for your account and campaigns that, when implemented, can increase your optimization score. Since automatic and intelligent bidding strategies improve the performance of your Google Ads campaigns, applying these strategies will have a positive effect on your optimization score, and ultimately your account will perform better overall. You can see proof of this everywhere, advertisers with an optimization score above 75% see 3x better conversion rates than others.
3- Saving time and energy
Letting go of manual keyword bid management means you get more time out of your day that you can devote to other tasks and responsibilities you have that may be piling up. Why bother with endless metrics and data, just hoping you can make the right decision to optimize bids, when automated and intelligent bidding strategies will immediately know what the right decision is? Let Google do what it does best, so you can spend your time doing what you do best!
Smarter Google Ads budgeting with WordStream
We’re almost at the end of the race and you can feel the excitement of reaching the finish line! At this point, WordStream Advisor will walk you through the short distance to successfully implement automated bidding strategies.
Through Wordstream’s twenty-minute Workweek Bid Optimization Alert, Wordstream Advisor can help you apply smart bidding strategies to campaigns that you can benefit from.
How does the Google AdWords smart bidding optimization warning work?
Bid Optimization analyzes your search campaigns, looks for poor performance, and provides suggestions to implement to maximize your conversion rate bidding strategy. A search campaign is eligible to receive these offers if:
- be active
- Be on manual bidding.
- Do not use a shared bidding portfolio or strategy
- At least three months
- Have conversion tracking
If you decide to apply bids, a twenty-minute Workweek alert data monitor will track the performance of the new bidding strategy on the selected campaign. The alert information monitor highlights campaign performance in two tracking intervals:
Learning window: in a 15-day window Google learns about the history of the campaign and accounts and their performance and creates a chart with a practical plan for the future.
Optimization period: in 30 days that is after the learning period Google can adopt the best strategies for the selected campaign.
Keep in mind that the learning window is a critical window in which Google’s algorithm gathers data to understand the best practices for optimizing campaign offers toward your conversion goals. Making big changes to a campaign while it’s in the learning phase can cause it to restart, thereby delaying the time it takes to see real improvements in different areas. To prevent this from happening, you’ll see a warning label on your campaign in the Manage section to remind you that it’s best not to touch the settings.
Using the Google Ads budgeting optimization alert to increase conversion rates
WordStream’s analytics team analyzed 204 campaigns that went through learning and optimization periods. Of these 204 campaigns:
70% of them have seen an increase in the conversion rate within 30 days of optimization compared to 30 days before it started.
80% of them have seen a decrease in CPA rate after changing the method to the bidding strategy of maximizing conversions.
The average percentage of changes in the conversion rate among these people was 83%!
My main goal in writing this article was to see how combining the technology of automatic and intelligent bidding strategies of Google Ads with the Word Stream consultant can help you in the daily management of your paid advertising accounts. Bit by bit, kilometer by kilometer, I think we have been able to achieve this goal together.
It is collaboration technology that we have chosen both consciously and unconsciously as a tool to help make our lives, tasks, and jobs easier, as well as to help improve our performance and the results we create. As digital marketers, we know that technology and its effective use help businesses grow. Using technology in online advertising will help you manage your accounts more effectively, improve campaign performance, and optimize key performance indicators that are important to your business.