Smart Bidding: Myths vs Facts

Welcome to the fifth (and final) installment in our Value-Based Bidding (VBB) deep dive series, Smart Bidding: Myths vs Facts. We’ve been shining a light on Value-Based Bidding, a Smart Bidding strategy. In this article today we look at the bigger picture of Smart Bidding and bring to you Smart Bidding: myths vs facts.

If you missed the first four installments of our Value-Based Bidding series, here they are for a quick recap!

1. An introduction to Value-Based Bidding (what it does and how it works)
2. Our Value-Based Bidding (VBB) Best Practice Guide outlining some core principles you need to follow to get the best out of your VBB campaigns.
3. A detail rich How-To guide on implementing Value-Based Bidding, including how to share offline data, information on connecting your CRM, first party data and manually assigning value to events.
4. Value-Based Bidding, and how to effectively analyze Value-Based Bidding performance. It’s great to set it up, but how do you know when it’s working well and what you should do with the information you find?

Smart Bidding: Myths vs Facts

Here we are, everyone, down to the finish line with our Smart Bidding series. Now that you know how valuable it is and how to implement it, let’s talk about the myths and assumptions that are often made.

• Myth 1: Making Changes Will Reset the Learning Period
• Myth 2: My Client’s Goals Aren’t Right for Smart Bidding
• Myth 3: Automated Bidding Doesn’t Work, As It Didn’t Work
• Myth 4: I Don’t Have Enough Conversions
• Myth 5: We Don’t Have Conversion Tracking in Place
• Myth 6: The Account Structure Isn’t Optimized for Automated Bidding

Myth 1: Making Changes Will Reset the Learning Period

As automated bidding became a part of Google Ads, we were often warned that any changes would reset the learning period. The advice we usually heard was to leave those campaigns alone until they exit the learning phase. With the current incarnation of Smart Bidding, this is no longer entirely true. 

Whilst most of the changes that used to result in a reset of the learning period are now ok to make, there are still some to be aware of.  Watch out for these and plan changes carefully. 

If you do make a change, don’t make any further changes or analyze data until you’ve left the campaign to run for the learning period and until you’ve given it a few weeks to start performing again.

Changes that do reset the learning period:

1. Implementing a new bid strategy (eg. moving from tCPA to Max Conversions).
2. Changing specific campaign bid strategy settings like
   1. Updating CPA.
   2. Moving from one smart bidding strategy to another.
   3. Adding a CPA or maximum CPC.
3. Conversion setting changes, eg. recently setting up conversion tracking or updating existing conversion tracking.
4. Conversion action setting changes like
   1. Removing or adding conversion actions from the bidding strategy.
   2. Changing the ‘include in conversions”  settings.
   3. Changing the conversion count settings.
5. Adding or removing campaigns, or making significant campaign structural changes like multiple ad groups or keyword changes. 

Myth 2: My Client’s Goals Aren’t Right for Smart Bidding

You may feel that your goals (or your client’s goals) don’t align with Smart Bidding. You’ll be surprised to find out that may not be true. There’s a strategy for most situations and goals. 

The current Smart Bidding strategies are:

• Target CPA
• Target ROAS
• Maximize conversions
• Maximize conversion value
• Target impression share
• Maximize clicks

At first glance, it may not seem like any of these fit the goals of a particular client, but it’s all about what you call a conversion. When you set up your conversion goals, make sure you match them with client goals. For instance, if your client only wanted more traffic to a specific product or service page, you could use a pageview goal potentially combined with a time on site metric, and a Maximize Conversions strategy. Or, you could use Maximize Clicks to get more traffic.

Myth 3: Automated Bidding Doesn’t Work, As It Didn’t Work

Have you tried automated bidding in the past without a great outcome? Don’t let a past experience taint your views on what it can do now. Automated bidding has (thankfully) changed a lot since the beginning, and it offers a valuable way to scale and improve your campaigns now. 

At the start it was a bit like an unruly toddler but we suggest giving it another try now that it’s well-tested, more advanced and post-puberty! Some tips for success are:

• Ensure your setup is correct.
• Verify conversion tracking works and is set up appropriately.
• Use Value-Based Bidding to give Google more data (read here the first in our deep dive series into Value-Based Bidding) 
• Optimize the parts of the campaign you do control
• Use Smart Bidding best practices to make sure your campaigns are set up for Smart Bidding

As with everything, of course, you should perform testing. Don’t just convert everything over to Automated Bidding all at once ????. (We love your enthusiasm, but that’s a recipe for mediocre results at best and a disaster at worst.)

Myth 4: I Don’t Have Enough Conversions

Gone are the days of needing a specific number of conversions just to deploy a bidding strategy. It is true that you’ll need 15 conversions over the last 30 days to start using tROAS or 20 conversions in 45 days for Shopping campaigns, however other strategies don’t have these requirements. In fact, they’ll help you scale your campaigns and increase your conversions if implemented properly.

Just one thing to note. The above doesn’t apply for video campaigns. For these, you’ll need at least 35 conversions per week to use an automated bidding strategy. That’s not to say that you can’t use one in your campaigns, but if you do it’s unlikely that you’ll be happy with the results ????????‍♀️.

Myth 5: We Don’t Have Conversion Tracking in Place

First of all, wait…what? Why wouldn’t you use conversion tracking? Ok, well, that’s a topic that could take up a whole post by itself. Let’s say that it’s reasonable not to track conversions on your site. You can still use Maximize Clicks to improve your performance.

Bidding Strategies for Stages of the Funnel

Bidding strategies fit all stages of the funnel. For the top of the funnel, you can use Maximize Clicks to get clicks to your site or Maximize Conversions and track page views of a key page, like the contact page. For an e-commerce, you can use this to track product page views.

Alternatively, if your goal is brand awareness, Target Impression Share is the strategy to use. You can choose the level of impression share you’d like to aim for, meaning you can chase a percentage of the total top of page results, absolute top of results page, or anywhere on results page impressions. 

In the middle of the funnel, Maximize Conversions comes into play again. For e-commerce, you can use it to optimize for “add to cart” or similar actions. For lead gen, there are many ways to go about optimizing here. One possible scenario is using Maximize Conversion value and assign a value to something like a white paper download.

At the bottom of the funnel, your smart bidding suite does a fantastic job helping you reach your goals (tROAS, tCPA, and in controlled situations, Max Conversions and Max Conv Value with no targets). 

Reasons to add conversion tracking

There are loads of reasons to add tracking. Firstly, why would you spend money without being able to see what you get for your money? Second, it’s difficult to optimize when you can’t measure the effects of your changes. If you’re looking for reasons to add conversion tracking, these top the list for us. 

• There’s no way to measure success without tracking.
• Optimization is blind without measurement.
• Your ad investment is wasted if you don’t know the results.
• You can’t take advantage of Google’s machine learning if it doesn’t have meaningful things to measure.
• It gives you a better understanding of your customers.
• It helps you improve ROI.

Myth 6: The Account Structure Isn’t Optimized for Automated Bidding

Do you feel that your account structure isn’t optimized for automated bidding?  So long as your account follows best practices, there’s no specific structure required to use automated bidding.

Automated bidding works at all stages of the funnel, which means: 

1. Works at all stages at the funnel.
2. Will help optimize your campaigns.
3. Helps you achieve goals.
4. Automatically adjusts bids for you at the time of auction.

Whether you have one campaign or 50, automated bidding can generally help you.

Takeaways

We hope we’ve busted some of the biggest smart bidding myths, and convinced you to give Smart Bidding a try. It can certainly be a valuable tool in your arsenal.  

Here are a few of the most important takeaways.

1. Almost everyone can use Smart Bidding.
2. Automated bidding is an essential part of a Google Ads marketing strategy.
3. The Smart Bidding strategies are learning/improving quickly now.

Keep in mind your competition is using it to get ahead, so it’s a smart (ALL puns intended) strategy to strategically deploy Automated Bidding to take full advantage of real-time bid adjustments and machine learning.