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Today’s post about using automated bidding within enhanced campaigns is the fifth in our bidding best practices series. The previous blog posts covered calculating mobile, location and time bid adjustments. 

We launched bid adjustments for device, location and time of day to help you control your bids without duplicating campaigns as part of enhanced campaigns. We’ve heard from many advertisers that these tools help them improve results and efficiency. However, for some advertisers - particularly those with large programs and accounts - managing campaigns at scale can still be time-intensive and complex.

Since bidding is fundamentally important to your success with AdWords, we've developed a set of automation tools to help improve your performance and save you time.

Benefits of AdWords bid automation
For almost any advertiser, using the right automated bidding solution can drive better results and improved efficiency. Here are some key benefits to using AdWords automated bid strategies in enhanced campaigns.

• Save time by optimizing keyword bids for your goal at scale. Automated tools dynamically change bids to meet your advertising goals across your keywords -- whether it’s 100 or 1 million keywords -- saving you time and effort.
• Create and manage campaigns independently from bidding strategy. New flexible bid strategies let you apply multiple bidding strategies within a single campaign or across campaigns. This provides you the freedom to optimize towards multiple advertising goals in the same campaign or across campaigns without being constrained by account structure. Read more about these below.
• Improve performance with auction-time bidding. Two flexible bid strategies, Target CPA and Enhanced CPC, use a combination of real-time performance signals including location, device, partner site and operating system to set specific bids at every auction. With auction-time bidding, these automated tools automatically calculate bid adjustments for you.
• Optimize over time to continuously improve results. Our automated tools adapt to performance changes over time, saving you the effort of manually evaluating performance reports and continuously changing bids to keep up with performance fluctuations.
• Easy to try. AdWords bid automation tools are free to use and available to all advertisers right in the AdWords interface.

When to use bid automation
In this section, we’ll provide guidance on when to use each of Google’s automated bid strategies within enhanced campaigns.

Target CPA (the flexible bid strategies version of Conversion Optimizer) is our most powerful bid automation tool. This bid strategy sets an optimum bid for every auction by predicting the likelihood of a conversion. It uses real-time inputs such as location, time, device, and network placement. Apply this strategy to ad groups or campaigns if your main goal is to maximize conversion volume while maintaining a target CPA. Target CPA will automatically set and optimize your bid adjustments for you, however, a -100% mobile bid adjustment will keep your ads from appearing on mobile devices.

Enhanced CPC can improve performance by adding automation on top of your manual bids. This automated bid strategy will refine your manual bids using the same real-time conversion prediction technology as Target CPA. You can still apply bid adjustments with this automated strategy if you know that device, location or time of day affects your conversion value in ways that are not measured in the conversion tracker. For example, if you want to use automation, but know that your mobile clicks drive value beyond online conversions, such as store visits, you can enable Enhanced CPC in combination with a bid adjustment for mobile to account for the difference in expected value per click.

The last two flexible bid strategies apply bid automation and work with existing manual bid adjustments. If your goal is getting the most clicks within a target spend, you can implement the Maximize Clicks bid strategy. Alternatively, if you’re more interested in visibility with top position impressions, you can try the Target Search Page location strategy. Read more about these strategies here.

If you’ve implemented one of the four flexible bid strategies, you can monitor your performance in the Shared Library and adjust if necessary.

While it might take some time to refine your automated bid strategy, the benefits of bid automation will improve your performance while saving you time and effort. To read more about automation and bidding adjustments, check out our Help Center.

Posted by Andrea Cohan, Product Marketing Manager, AdWords

Today’s post will provide guidance on using time bid adjustments.  It is the fourth post in a bidding best practices series. Previous posts covered optimization strategies for setting location and mobile bid adjustments as well as prioritization.

In our constantly connected world, people are searching on multiple devices throughout the day for places to go, things to buy, and ways to stay entertained. People often use similar search results in different ways depending on the time of day that they search. For example, if someone is searching for “Hawaii vacations” during the workday, she may just be doing research for an upcoming trip.  When she returns home and conducts the same search in the evening, she may be more likely to have all the info she needs to book the flights and hotels.

With this constant connectivity, search marketers can now receive web traffic from across the globe and around the clock. Most businesses can still identify peak days and times when they see better ROI and lower costs.  At other times, customer activity might be slower and some businesses may wish to drive additional visits even if the cost is a bit higher.

If your business sees regular cycles of customer behavior and AdWords performance during the week, then using the time bid adjustment feature in AdWords enhanced campaigns may make sense for you.  This feature can help you improve results by allowing you to increase or decrease bids by day of the week or time of day.

Getting started with time bid adjustments
Before making any adjustments, it’s important to choose the right level of granularity for analysis.  For example, will you adjust bids by day of the week, eight hour increments, or down to the hour?  While you may be tempted to optimize down to the hour, it’s important to ensure that you have sufficient data to make decisions for each time period.  A general rule would be to have 1,000 clicks and 30 conversions for each time period you’re looking to optimize.

Calculating your time bid adjustments
Once you decide that using time bid adjustments are right for your business, compare the performance of your ads at varying times to your overall performance goal.  This will allow you to easily determine the right bid adjustment for each time period.

If you are setting a goal using a cost per action target, your bid adjustment can be calculated as follows:

Time bid adjustment = 100%* (( Campaign Goal  ÷ Actual Performance) - 1)

For example, let’s say you are an online retailer who sees better traffic and performance on weekdays as opposed to weekends. You would like to target a $30 cost per acquisition overall, but you are experiencing a $25 cost per acquisition on weekdays and a $40 cost per acquisition on weekends.  To meet your performance goal and maximize efficiency you can use a time bid adjustment.  Simply adjust your bids on weekdays by +20%, and on weekends by -25%.  This allows you to optimize for your goal by bidding more aggressively on weekdays when conversions are more cost effective, and less aggressively on weekends when performance is lower.

Test and Learn
Constant iteration is a key part of the optimization process. To ensure you are optimized over time, check the performance for each time adjustment regularly on the Time subtab in your campaign settings. Raise your bid adjustment where your performance exceeds your goal and lower your bid adjustment where your performance falls short of your goal. This will allow you to optimize your bids and adjust to changing consumer behavior.

Tips
You should also take this opportunity to study your internal data to understand when you have peak activity in terms of conversion rates, order size, and overall volume.  If you have a physical store or run a call center, you may consider using those hours of operation as guideposts for setting your time bid adjustment.  Studying the volume of activity during the times you are open can give you a good sense of when you may wish to raise or lower your bids.  For example, if your call center is closed during the night, you may wish to decrease bids during this time to avoid sending customers to unsupported lines.  By the same token, if you operate a physical store and see lulls in traffic during certain hours, you may wish to increase bids during this time and run ads with promotional offers to drive more people to your business.

Reminders
Time bid adjustments are a key part of enhanced campaigns.  To use time bid adjustments alongside location and mobile bid adjustments, you’ll need to upgrade your campaigns.  Starting on July 22, 2013, we will begin automatically upgrading all campaigns to enhanced campaigns.

Later this week, we’ll dive deeper into ways you can use tools like flexible bid strategies to automate your bid settings based on specific business goals like cost per acquisition.

Posted by Ting Zhang, Global Search Solutions

The ability to make changes to your AdWords account in bulk enables you to spend more time optimizing your campaigns to grow your business, and less time on repetitive tasks.  Just last month, we launched keyword bulk uploads to help you add, edit and remove keywords at scale.  Today, we are happy to announce bulk uploads for ads and ad groups.

Imagine you download a report from the Ads tab and want to test different creatives in ad groups that are underperforming.  You might also want to turn off certain ad groups, or change the budget for others.  Instead of toggling back and forth between AdWords and your spreadsheets, you can now download reports from the Ads and Ad Groups tabs, make changes directly in your spreadsheet, and upload them directly to your account.

Uploading changes to your ads and ad groups is simple.  Just like with keywords, when you download a report you will be prompted to make the report “editable.”


After making your changes, you can save your changes in CSV, TSV and Excel formats.  To upload this file, click “Reports and uploads” on the left navigation panel, and then select the “Uploads” tab.  You will see a new column here titled “Upload type,” shown below.


You can only upload one report type at a time; for example, if you want to make bulk changes to both your keywords and your ad creatives, you would have to do this by editing and uploading two separate reports.

As with keyword bulk uploads, there is no way to cancel or automatically reverse your changes once a report has been submitted.  Please remember to save a copy of your original downloaded report if you need to know what your settings were before you made changes and submitted a bulk upload.  You can also view your change history and reverse any unintended changes manually.

To learn more about bulk uploads for ads and ad groups, visit the bulk uploads article in our Help Center or discuss in our AdWords Community.

Posted by Prashant Baheti, Product Manager, AdWords

On Tuesday, June 4th DoubleClick will host its annual digital leadership summit, thinkDoubleClick, with provocative conversations about the future of digital marketing and media, and you’re invited to join via live stream by registering here!


Hear executives from advertising, agencies and publishers discuss some of the big questions in digital such as:

• How do creatives leverage, but not be overwhelmed by, technology to deliver next-generation consumer experiences?
• What unique experiences are publishers developing that add value to consumers and advertisers alike?
• How do CMOs best use social with other marketing channels to build strong brands?

The full agenda for the thinkDoubleClick event is listed below.  You can join in the conversation on June 4 by using the #thinkDCLK hash and commenting during the live stream.

Register here for the thinkDoubleClick summit
June 4, 2013
9 am - 12:15 PDT


We look forward to seeing you on June 4th at thinkDoubleClick.

The digital journey has grown more complex, giving customers the option to move seamlessly across media and devices. This shift in technology can make it challenging to get a complete picture of customers’ interactions.  As a marketer, your success depends on gaining visibility into your customers’ preferences and behaviors.


Next Thursday, join Sara Jablon Moked, Product Marketing Manager for Google Analytics, for a detailed look at effective measurement for today's multi-device world. We will discuss strategies and best practices for measuring customer behavior, and we’ll look at how Google Analytics and other Google tools can help you measure and respond to the evolving customer journey.

The webinar will include live Q&A.

Date: Thursday, May 30, 2013
Time: 10am PST / 1pm EST/ 6PM GMT
Duration: 1 hr
Level: 100 / Beginner
Register: Register here

Posted by the Google Analytics team

Today’s post about calculating mobile bid adjustments is the third in a bidding best practices series. The previous post covered improving your results with location bid adjustments.

People are now constantly connected and switching seamlessly between devices. In fact, more than 38% of our daily media interactions occur on mobile¹. This presents advertisers with new opportunities to reach customers anytime, anyplace, on any device. At Google, we want to help you capitalize on these opportunities and develop new strategies for your business to win on mobile.

Mobile bid adjustments in AdWords enhanced campaigns give advertisers the power to optimize bids across devices — all from a single campaign. In today’s post, we’ll help you understand how to calculate a mobile bid adjustment that accounts for the total conversion value your mobile ads drive for your business.

Review your current desktop and mobile performance
Before calculating your mobile bid adjustment, you can run an AdWords report to review your current desktop and mobile performance. While online conversions, app downloads, and calls are easy to track in AdWords, other conversions such as in-store visits may be harder to attribute directly to your ads. For those conversions, you may need to estimate their value. The closer you can estimate the value of these conversions, the more optimized your bid will be on mobile.

Calculate your mobile bid adjustment
The key to optimizing your mobile bid adjustment is to identify the ratio of mobile vs desktop (and tablet) conversion value. This is calculated by dividing your value per click on mobile by your value per click on desktop.

We’ll illustrate this calculation using the table below. Let’s say this data belongs to a national retailer with mobile and desktop websites as well as physical stores. In the past month, this retailer saw 10,000 clicks from her mobile ads and 10,000 clicks from her desktop and tablet ads.  Her mobile ads drove $900 of revenue from phone calls to her stores, $5,000 from online sales and $5,000 from in-store visits for a total of $10,900. During this same month, her desktop and tablet ads drove $100 of revenue from calls, $10,000 from online sales, and $2,000 from in-store visits for a total of $12,100.


With this information, the retailer calculates the value per click (for mobile and desktop) by dividing the total value (i.e., the total revenue from all conversion types) by the total number of clicks, respectively. In this case, the mobile value per click is $1.09 and the desktop value per click is $1.21.

The retailer’s mobile bid adjustment is the ratio of these two values: she divides the value per click on mobile by the value per click on desktop and then subtracts 1. In this case we have (1.09/1.21) - 1, or a -10% mobile bid adjustment that can be entered into AdWords.

Iterate and test
As with all online marketing techniques, mobile bid adjustments aren’t something you should just “set and forget.” Frequent iteration and testing will help you account for changes in seasonality or business operations.  Due to varying screen sizes on mobile, we also recommend that you keep a close eye on your mobile impression share so that your ads show in the top positions.

Learn more
To learn more about mobile bid adjustments, visit the AdWords Help Center or watch this recording of this hangout on air, “Enhanced Campaigns: Optimizing Mobile Strategy.”

To use mobile bid adjustments, you’ll need to upgrade your campaigns to enhanced campaigns. Starting on July 22, 2013, we will begin automatically upgrading all campaigns.

Next week, we’ll dive deeper into ways you can use tools like conversion optimizer and eCPC to automate your bid settings based on specific business goals like ROI.

Posted by Andy Miller, Head of Mobile Search Solutions

¹http://www.google.com/think/research-studies/the-new-multi-screen-world-study.html

Imagine: you’ve built a beautiful digital marketing campaign and it’s finally live. You get your reports back with a list of data points and while the numbers seem good, it’s pretty hard to understand them without any reference points. That’s the crutch: data doesn’t take on meaning when it’s just floating around in the ether; you need to build context around your data and anchor it to other relevant data points to better understand what your own numbers mean.

Industry benchmarks -- reference points aggregated from ad campaigns across the industry -- give you these comparisons. And today, for the first time, we’re launching the Display Benchmarks Tool, an easy-to-use webpage that lets you pull benchmarks to help you make better decisions about your campaigns.



Whether you're after comparisons by country, industry vertical, ad size or ad format, our tool offers up-to-date benchmarks across 10 key display metrics, such as interaction rate and time, expansion rate and video completions. Here’s a quick demo of how to pull the benchmarks.

We've been playing around with the tool and identified some interesting trends around user engagement in our industry. Here's a bit of what we've seen:

Trend #1 User choice leads to more engagement: People want to choose how and when they consume content online. We’re starting to see new ad formats, such as the TrueView and Engagement formats, that let people choose whether to watch or skip an ad. Our benchmark data shows that people are increasingly choosing to interact with these ads. Video completion rates are the highest we’ve ever seen, with people completing 60% of the videos that they watch.

Trend #2: Richer ads lead to more engagement: Longer interaction also stems from more beautiful and compelling ads, which advertisers are increasingly incorporating in their campaigns. Interactive video ads, such as this one from Cadillac, allow advertisers to layer information about their brands on top of their video commercials. Dual-channel ads, such as this Skyfall ad, let viewers turn their mobile phones and tablets into controllers that dictate what happens within the content on their desktop. These ads represent the new creative formats that are closing the gap between advertising and awesome content. And we’re seeing the results: since last summer, people are interacting with rich media ads ~50-60% more frequently and spending ~20% more time interacting.

Trend #3: Optimize your campaigns for engagement: Advertisers used to rely solely on click-through rates and reach/frequency reports to measure their campaigns. Now, these new rich media formats provide a better set of metrics, which help advertisers understand what’s best for users and optimize their campaigns. For example, from the benchmarks tool we’ve learned that interaction rates correlate strongly with larger ad area - the bigger the ad, the more frequently people will interact with it. Similarly, we’ve learned that rich media expanding formats are better for getting people to interact frequently, while in-page formats are better for getting people to interact for longer amounts of time. These types of insights are instrumental in making improvements to an advertiser’s campaign.

These findings confirm what we've heard from our partners -- as ads become more engaging and relevant to users, their performance improves. If you’re still hungry for more data, don’t worry --  next Tuesday, we’ll be kicking off a “Data Insights Blog Series,” where we’ll deep-dive into one trend a week and explain how the insights apply to your campaigns.

As you check out the tool for yourself, let us know if you find any nuggets you think we’ve missed. We just might feature your insight in one of our blog posts.

Posted by Becky Chappell, Product Marketing, DoubleClick

(Cross-posted from the DoubleClick Search blog)

Last month, the DoubleClick Search team introduced the beta release of dedicated tools to help advertisers seamlessly upgrade to enhanced campaigns. Today, we’re excited to announce that these tools are available to all DoubleClick Search customers globally. Read on for details around the newly available features, what's coming, and how customers are seeing success in upgrading to enhanced campaigns with DoubleClick Search.

Easily upgrade to enhanced campaigns
With this release, advertisers can save time when upgrading to enhanced campaigns with custom solutions that will:

• Identify similar campaigns that target different devices within your DoubleClick Search account
• Create reports to quickly merge and upload these similar campaigns into one enhanced campaign
• Provide the AdWords-suggested mobile bid adjustment in DoubleClick Search for more control and precision over bids in an enhanced campaign

Learn about these features and more in the enhanced campaigns upgrade guide.

Upcoming features
This is the second of several feature rollouts we have planned for enhanced campaigns. Over the next few weeks, the DoubleClick Search team will be introducing advanced features to prepare advertisers for a constantly connected world, including support for ad group mobile bid adjustments and granular device-segmented reports.

What we’re hearing so far
With the goal of simplifying search managing, we’re continuing to invest in solutions that will help marketers run effective search campaigns across devices, as well as across channels -- and our clients are seeing the benefits.

Keith Wilson, VP of Agency Products at The Search Agency, notes: "Recent enhancements in DoubleClick Search support for enhanced campaigns has been a wind on our backs for transitioning clients to enhanced campaigns. The overall functionality within DoubleClick Search is evolving rapidly, and that enables our teams to keep pace with the changes in the paid search space with the right tools.”

After performing initial upgrades using DoubleClick Search tools, Samridhi Chawla,
 Senior Account Manager at Performics, said: "Our accounts look cleaner after upgrading to enhanced campaigns. The DoubleClick Search team has done a great job in making the transition smooth, and we're already seeing positive results."

Hear more about our enhanced campaigns vision from our clients and product experts:

  

To learn more about how clients have been using our enhanced campaigns upgrade tools, we’ll be at SMX Advanced in June, where Eric Papczun, US President of Performics, will share his company's plans, successes, and best practices on upgrades through using search platforms like DoubleClick Search. Register here, and stay tuned to the DoubleClick Search blog to learn more about our support of enhanced campaigns features.

Posted by Kim Doan, Product Marketing Manager, DoubleClick Search

1. Set the date range to the past 30 days (longer if your campaign is on the smaller side).
2. Click on the “Location details” button and select “What triggered your ad.”
3. Click the View button and select Region.
4. Click Download.

To maximize orders or leads at a particular CPA or ROI level, a common best practice for setting bid adjustments is to equalize your target metrics across all locations. As a math formula, it looks like this:


Here’s an example from a campaign with a cost-per-action goal.


You can implement your bid adjustments in the AdWords interface (directions) or using the AdWords Editor (directions).

Businesses with local stores or service areas
Closer customers are often more likely to buy from you and less costly to serve. So if your business has local stores or service areas, you should consider optimizing your bids based on customer proximity. For example, you can easily set one location target for customers within 2 miles of your business locations, and a second target for customers within 20 miles of your business locations (directions). Then use the approach described above to calculate your optimum bid adjustment for your two location extension targets.

Tips and reminders

• Maintain a broad location target to cover your entire potential market. Targeting too narrowly can limit your reach, clicks and conversions.
  
  
• It’s OK to set overlapping location targets with bid adjustments. We’ll only apply the most specific location bid adjustment. For example, say you have a +10% bid adjustment for Canada and a +20% bid adjustment for Montreal. When someone searches in Montreal, your bid will be increased by 20%. And you’ll see distinct performance stats for Montreal and all of Canada except Montreal on the Locations subtab on the campaign Settings main tab.
  
  
• Be careful when you don’t have much data. Otherwise your calculated bid adjustments could end up being too high or too low, and you could end up with worse results instead of better. If you don’t have statistical expertise on hand, we recommend not adjusting bids in locations with fewer than 1000 clicks and 30 conversions, as a general rule of thumb. Lengthening the date range for your reports to the past 90 days or more can help.
  
  
• Periodically check performance and increment your bid adjustments. From time to time, check your performance for each location target on the Locations subtab. Incrementally raise your bid adjustment where your performance is above your goal, and lower your bid adjustment where your performance is below your goal. This will allow you to optimize your bids over time and adjust to changing consumer behavior.
  

Posted by John Sullivan, Global Search Solutions

On June 11th, Google Shopping will complete the transition to a commercial model in the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Japan, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Brazil, Australia, Switzerland and the Czech Republic. When the transition is complete, free product listings will no longer appear on Google Shopping. We believe this new model, built on Product Listing Ads, will help retailers of all sizes connect the right products with customers around the world, increase clicks to their sites, and convert more shoppers into buyers.

Onward and upward
We've been pleased with the rapid adoption of Google Shopping by the global retail community. Over 1 billion products are now being promoted globally on Google Shopping, largely driven by a 300% year-on-year growth in participating sellers (including many aggregators and marketplaces). And we’ve seen 20% growth in traffic to retailers over the past year.

Global merchant success stories
We’ve heard from a variety of retailers around the world who have embraced Google Shopping and are seeing great results. Check out the highlights below:


Make the most of Google Shopping
Whether you’re just getting started with Product Listing Ads or are looking for more advanced optimization strategies, we’ve compiled our top recommendations to succeed with Google Shopping below. Read on for these quick tips and sign up for one of our upcoming Hangouts on Air in your country to learn how you can prepare for the global commercial transition.

If you’re new to Product Listing Ads

• Get started with Merchant Center, the place to upload your product data to Google 
• Once your products are in Merchant Center, create a Product Listing Ads campaign to promote your products on Google Shopping

If  you’re already using Product Listing Ads

• Use the All Products target to quickly promote your entire inventory
• Take advantage of automatic bidding for Product Listing Ads, which saves you time and resources by enabling Google to automatically adjust your CPC bids to optimize traffic
• Provide high quality data and follow our updated product feed specifications
• Promote products across devices by ensuring all of your Product Listing Ads campaigns are upgraded to enhanced campaigns

For agencies

• Join Google Engage to get the latest agency news, trainings and support from the Google Shopping team

Need additional assistance? We’re happy to help. Feel free to visit our Help Center or call one of our Shopping specialists in your country below:

• Australia - 1800 087 124
• Brazil - 0800 727 8947
• Czech Republic - 800 500 353
• France - 805 540 727
• Germany - 0800 5894933
• Italy - 800930819
• Japan - 0120-984-684
• Netherlands - 0800 2500026
• Spain - 900 814 539
• Switzerland - 0800 002539
• United Kingdom - 0800 169 0711

Posted by: Sameer Samat, Vice President of Product Management, Google Shopping

The latest version of AdWords Editor gives you more ways to make bulk changes to your enhanced campaigns. With the new version, you can:

• Set bid adjustments for placements, topics, and audiences.
• Set mobile bid adjustments at the ad group level.
• Upgrade campaigns in bulk using CSV import or the Add/update multiple campaigns tool.
• Use the new ValueTrack {ifmobile}, {ifnotmobile} parameters.

On the Keywords tab, new columns show detailed keyword performance metrics on the Display Network, enabling you to manage and optimize your Display campaigns with the same granular level of control as your Search campaigns. For example, you can adjust keyword bids depending on their performance, and fine-tune campaigns based on your specific goals.

We've also improved the performance statistics that you can download for locations, audiences, and placements.

For more details about these changes and other updates, see our AdWords Editor 10.1 release notes.

The next time you launch AdWords Editor, you'll see a prompt to upgrade to version 10.1. To learn more about upgrading, including how to keep unposted changes and comments when you upgrade, please review these instructions. You can also download version 10.1 from the AdWords Editor website.

Note: Support for previous versions of AdWords Editor will continue for four months to allow you time to upgrade. To ensure uninterrupted use of AdWords Editor, you will need to upgrade by September 16, 2013.

Posted by Darcy Lima, AdWords Editor

Have you ever wished you could apply automated bidding to part of your campaign while manually bidding on other keywords in the same campaign? Or maybe you’ve wanted to apply a single bid strategy to some keywords, but they’re in different campaigns?  Now you can with flexible bid strategies, available in the next couple weeks when you upgrade to an enhanced campaign. Flexible bid strategies let you apply multiple bidding strategies within a single campaign or across campaigns. This provides you the freedom to choose the appropriate bid strategy without being constrained by account structure.

Control and insights with new flexible bid strategies

Ramping up over the next couple weeks, flexible bid strategies can be found in the Shared library (see image below). Once you’ve created a flexible bid strategy, you can apply it to specific keywords, ad groups, and campaigns and monitor its performance.



Here’s more information about what each flexible bid strategy does and when you can use it:



Some of our bid strategies incorporate real-time details during each auction such as device, location, and other context signals to adjust your bids based on your ad’s predicted performance. This approach offers the potential for even better performance. Target CPA and Enhanced CPC use this technology today, and it will be incorporated into other bidding strategies in the future.

Customizing the new flexible bid strategies to work for you

Flexible bid strategies let you apply a bid strategy to keywords across separate campaigns, or test multiple bid strategies within a single campaign. Say, for example, you run a network security consulting business. You might have some keywords like ‘network security’ in multiple campaigns focused on generating awareness for your business. You can apply the Target search page location bidding strategy to those specific keywords regardless of where they are in your account, to keep them in top positions.  Then let’s say you have another campaign mainly aimed at lead generation with keywords like ”perimeter network security audit,” but which also has some awareness building keywords, too, like “perimeter network security best practices.” In this campaign, you can use the Target CPA bidding strategy for the lead generation ad groups and use the Target search page location bidding strategy for the awareness building keywords.

You can learn more about flexible bid strategies by visiting our help center. As with all types of automation, we recommend that you periodically monitor your bid strategies’ performance relative to your advertising goals.

In addition to new features like flexible bid strategies and support for many-per-click conversions in Conversion Optimizer, we’re working on more optimization features to help you more easily achieve your advertising goals, like return on ad spend. Let us know what you think of these new flexible bid strategies on our Ads Google+ page and stay tuned for more to come.

Posted by Andrea Cohan, Product Marketing Manager, AdWords