Smart Bidding: How to Bid Like a Pro in Google Ads

Smart Bidding Bid Like a Pro: Google’s automated ‘Smart Bidding’ feature is not new. Essentially, Smart Bidding is defined as ‘auction-time bidding.’ It is also a widely misused and misunderstood feature that, only now, marketers are starting to grasp and utilise properly.

From Enhanced CPC to Target ROAS, to Target Cost Per Acquisition to Maximise Conversions, there are a number of automated Smart Bidding strategies to be aware of and understand. Furthermore, there are a wide range of contextual signals that are factored into bid optimisation such as device, location, time of day, day of the week and audience, to name but a few.

That said, it is even more lucrative to know how to bid using them to their fullest potential. Indeed, here is how you can bid like a professional in Google Ads.

1. Smart Bidding: Patience is Key

People underestimate the patience involved in an automated Smart Bidding strategy. Google, whenever you begin a campaign or make a significant campaign change, goes through a ‘learning period.’

It’s important not to end a campaign before Google has had a chance to learn what it needs to do. Indeed, the platform requires 5-7 days to process how best to use your budget.

It is also good to deeply analyse your Smart Bidding Strategy Report. In doing so, you can then know for certain whether to make a change or not.

2. Smart Bidding: Stop Making Continuous Major Changes to Your Campaigns

If you are to make adjustments to your target metric and campaign in general, seasonal adaptations should be made right when the campaign conversion rate deviates from its usual average.

Google Smart Bidding values and rewards patience so, if you are contemplating making a very major change to your campaign, make sure you are extremely confident in your decision.

Furthermore, Google Ads runs on a default, 30-day conversion window. So, if your user clicks on an ad today, but then does noy convert for another 3 weeks, Google claims the conversion.

And, if your conversion cycle is relatively long, then this may not look extremely prosperous on a report because some users may not have even converted yet by the time the month concludes.

These conversions will inevitably come later, however, if they don’t, then that is when it is important not to overlook the data, especially if conversion lag is no longer the overriding issue.

3. Smart Bidding: Be Realistic When Trying to Reduce Your Target CPA

Google’s automated Smart Bidding process only takes into consideration the last 30 days’ worth of data, disregarding the last 7 days in case it is not consistent or largely reliable. And so, knowing this, it is important that your Taget CPA or ROAS aligns with the data Google has already collected.

In essence, Google learns from what is working and what isn’t so, make sure your data is consistent and reliable, only then can particular Smart Bidding practices have their desired impact. Indeed, be sure to get comfortable with your goals and objectives and then – and only then – should you slowly increase or decrease your target accordingly.

4. Smart Bidding: Always Stay Goal Orientated

Focus on your campaign goal and the metrics which support that such as conversions or conversion value. Indeed, make sure not to get bogged down by vanity metrics such as Impression Share and Click-Through-Rate, for example.

Google knows more about the people you are targeting than them themselves. Moreover, the way Google leverages this data is by displaying your ads when it is most confident that they are being displayed to the right, most suitable audience.

Because of this, certain metrics can drop or look like they are underperforming. For that reason, when it comes to Smart Bidding, it is best to stay goal orientated and, to some extent, disregard any other metrics entirely.

5. Maximise Your Google Ads Campaign with PPC Geeks

We hope this article has been useful in helping you bid like a pro using your newfound Smart Bidding techniques.

What’s more, if you need help increasing leads and revenue, it may be worth investing in a completely free, and extremely beneficial Google Ads audit.

From keyword research to a thorough competitor analysis, our Google Ads audits are executed by experts and are guaranteed to help boost your ROI.