Google introduced Smart Bidding on Monday, which is a new umbrella name for automated bidding strategies, which includes Target, ROAS, Target CPA, and Enhanced CPC in AdWords and DoubleClick Search. Another thing that’s coming soon is the ability to set different Target CPA goals by device in both display and search campaigns. This will be rolling out to advertisers in the next few weeks.
Smart Bidding, which is powered by machine learning, “can factor in millions of signals to determine the optimal bid, and it continually refines models of your conversion performance at different bid levels,” said Anthony Chavez, the product management director of search ads at Google, in the announcement.
You can set Smart Bidding to optimize for conversions or conversion value programmatically in real time. Smart Bidding takes into account the signals in AdWords, like browser, language, manual bid adjustments for location, device, location intent and similar product attributes. More signals will be added by Google later, like seasonality and price competitiveness over time.
But something that is available now in AdWords is alerts around bidding, and more reporting for campaign-level bid strategies is rolling out.Bidding status will soon display in campaign and ad group status columns as well.
Although Smart Bidding is available to everybody, the modeling works best for those advertisers that have at least 30 conversions in the past 30 days for Enhanced CPC and Target CPA and 50 conversions in the past 30 days for Target ROAS.