Google has been trying to play around with its smart bidding function over the last few years, and as of last year, it finally announced some updates. In August 2008, Google updated eligible campaigns to Enhanced CPC Bidding, the main purpose behind which was to show your ads when they were most likely to get converted. Three months later, in November 2018, Target Impression Share Bidding was introduced. This function gave more control to the users in terms of how often they want their ad to be displayed to the target audience.
The following new updates have been added to the Google Smart Bidding recently.
Bidding Strategy Update: Maximize Conversion Value
One of the latest bidding strategies launched at this year’s Google Marketing Live was Maximize Conversion Value. This new update facilitates the users in maximizing the total conversion value of their campaigns while remaining within their ad budgets.
Conversions Tracking
Before starting with this new feature, you might need to play around with the previous settings a bit. Normally, the conversions tracking tool will be in place for you, but for using this feature, you will also need to track transaction-specific conversion values. Don’t worry, it’s not as bad as it may sound.
The main advantage of this tool is that it can provide transaction-specific values for each conversion, whenever you are tracking customer actions that bear different values every time they occur, e.g. the purchase of products with different price tags. Consequently, the Return on Investment (ROI) calculated is much more accurate.
Once both the tools are in place, the site’s tags will have to be adjusted a little. You will have to add a value and currency parameter in order to constantly provide the conversion value and the currency information to the event snippet.
Adjusting Seasonality for Smart Bidding
Conversion rates never stay static and keep varying over the year. Even though small variations are already adjusted through older strategies such as Target CPA and Target ROAS, you still need to be careful about the ‘larger-than-normal’ shifts and fix things accordingly. Yikes.
Don’t worry yourself, Love. To take care of such unusual shifts, Google launched the Seasonality Adjustments feature on August 28th. (Yay Google!). According to Google, this new feature works best for short-term adjustments such as 1-7 days and is currently not to be used for periods greater than 14 days at a time.
How to Create a Seasonality Adjustment
Creating a seasonality adjustment is as easy as winking. Just go to the Shared Library under Bid Strategies and click Advanced Controls. You will be able to provide a name and description, set start and end dates for the duration you expect a certain trend, choose specific times of the day, select particular campaigns, campaign types and/or devices that you want to apply the adjustments to, and finally mention the approximate increase or decrease in conversion rates that you have anticipated. And you’re done! I told you it was easy.
Conclusion
The updates Google has been introducing for Smart Bidding are not going to stop anytime soon. Heck, these are the first few of many to come and we can expect a couple more by the end of 2019, including a probable increase in their frequency and complexity in the years to come. Are you ready?