Google Search Ads 360, the enterprise-level search management piece of Google Marketing Platform that lets advertisers and agencies manage campaigns across multiple search engines, has added auction-bidding for bids on Google Search.
For those using Search Ads 360, this brings the Smart Bidding capabilities offered in Google Ads to your Google Search campaign. Smart bidding uses machine learning to make real-time bids based on a number of different signals, like device, time of day and location.
Auction-time bidding will analyze your account history, conversions registered by Floodlight, which is Google Marketing Platform’s conversion tracking system, and other signals to help predict when a conversion will probably occur from an ad click. By comparison, a Search Ads 360 bid strategy analyzes campaign performance approximately every 6 hours to set keyword bids and set or recommend bid adjustments.
“By activating auction-time bidding you can enhance your performance when bidding on Google Search, while still maintaining your cross-channel bidding strategy powered by Search Ads 360,” explained Jason Krueger, a Search Ads 360 product manager, in the announcement.
Auction-time bidding is generally available for Google Search campaigns and in open beta for Google Shopping campaigns.
Since auction-time bidding is machine learning-driven and requires data to train, Smart Bidding system will learn for at least a week before it begins setting auction-time bids.
According to Google, hundreds of advertisers participated in the beta and saw, on average, a conversion lift of 15 to 30% at the same or better ROI.
Click on an existing bid strategy to enable auction-time bidding in your Google Search campaigns as shown in the screenshot below. When you opt in, you consent to share the bid strategy’s Floodlight conversions with Google Ads to enable both bidding systems to use the same conversion data.
For more details, see the help page.