Don’t Be Afraid Of Automation
When it comes to optimizing campaigns, it’s in every paid search manager’s nature to hold onto control for dear life. However, there are impressive automated bidding solutions on the market that have us stepping out of our comfort zones. IMI has been testing bid strategies within the Google and Bing platforms alongside 3rd party tools and has seen a lot of success using Search Ads 360 (SA360). Here are our top 3 reasons why you should try implementing automated bid strategies when using SA360.
Bid Strategies can save you time
- Making bid adjustments through the publisher is tedious. We can all agree that figuring out how much to bid on keywords along with devices, location, and remarketing takes up a lot of time. This time could be put towards testing new tactics, ad copy, or even building out brand new campaigns.
- Building an automated bid strategy takes the work out of bid adjustments and utilizes historical data to make the best predictions for you. I know what you’re thinking. “Oh no, a machine can do my job for me?” Well, yes and no. You still have to set up the budgets and adjust the constraints. Think of this as a tool to help you achieve better performance rather than doing a job for you. A well-oiled machine still needs a competent operator.
Bid Strategies can help with budget pacing
- Have you ever run out of budget before the end of the month or overspent, and your client or boss is unhappy about it? Budget management and setting a budget plan will keep you on track. You can set a goal to spend for the length of your flight and you can even set a recurring plan and goal that automatically populates.
- You have the option to set heavier or lighter spend periods through your flight dates. If you have an upcoming promo or know of an upcoming slow season, SA360 gives you the ability to set custom spend levels for a specific day or week.
- There is one caveat though, your SA360 bid strategy will never stop your spend for you even when you set a budget for your publisher to follow. The bid strategy will allow your campaigns to spend as close to your intended budget as possible but it won’t stop your publisher from going overspend completely. This has to be set up at the publisher level with an IO.
Bid Strategies can give a stagnant account a performance boost
- SA360 strategies, like other platforms, take additional signals into account when bidding that you may not have when bidding manually so it can help to jump-start a stagnant account.
- That being said, patience is key here! SA360 needs a lot of conversion data to help your campaigns get to optimal performance. Each bid strategy will have a “learning” phase while it determines what constraints are best for your goals as it takes past conversion data into account. The longer you have a bid strategy running, the more effective it will be in giving you the revenue or ROAS goal you desire.
- Try out different goals (conversions vs revenue vs ROAS) and see which helps your campaigns perform the best! One of the best features of the SA360 bid strategies is that you can choose how to apply them on the campaigns. Try Non-brand campaigns set to maximize clicks while setting your branded campaigns to maximize revenue. Try setting a solid ROAS goal and set your constraint to hit a minimum ROAS requirement.
