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Disclaimer: This document is intended to help you learn which tools in Optmyzr enable certain objectives. Any recommendations in this guide are not advertising or strategic advice. Always adjust and test ideas in the context of a given account’s business and advertising goals.
Introduction
If you run search and display campaigns on Google Ads, chances are you’re familiar with automated bidding and its machine learning-powered cousin Smart Bidding. Both of them take the guesswork out of bid adjustments, focusing instead on the desired outcome such as maximizing clicks, impressions, conversion quantity, conversion value, or meeting a target CPA or ROAS.
Automated bidding in Google Ads has conquered the trust barrier – less than 5% of Optmyzr customers use only manual bidding. But as the name implies, it only monitors and adjusts your CPC bids, leaving you free to focus on refining audiences, writing or designing better assets, and feeding high-quality data back to Google.
Existing as a subset of Smart Bidding, value-based bidding isn’t a selectable option within Google Ads but an approach designed to get you the most valuable leads for your budget (aka better ROI).
Using the Maximize Conversion Value strategy with a target ROAS, value-based bidding lets you tell Google which leads are most valuable to your business so they can bring you more of those. You do this by sharing information that Google can’t typically access, such as your average order value or lead-to-sale conversion rate.
Here’s how we let you optimize the bidding component of your campaigns even when using these automated strategies.
Areas to manage for campaigns on automated bidding:
Monitor and tweak campaign targets based on the performance (available tools include Rule Engine)
For multiple ad groups in a campaign, tweaking ad group-level targets to give each one enough bandwidth to perform (Rule Engine, Optimize Target CPA, Optimize Target ROAS)
Add negative keywords to ad groups to sculpt traffic and reduce wasteful spend (Rule Engine, Traffic Sculptor, Non-Converting Queries (Search))
Account-level placement exclusions for Smart Bidding and campaign and/or ad group-level for other bid strategies to combat wasteful spend, especially from mobile apps (Rule Engine, Account-Level Placement Exclusion, Mobile App Exclusion, Display Placement Exclusion)
Analyze campaign performance based on loss of impression share due to budget and your goal to get more conversions or clicks by adjusting budgets (Optimize Budgets for Single Platform)
Bid adjustments and audience/demographic targeting to spend on better conversions (Rule Engine, Device/Audience/Geo/Hour of Week Bid Adjustments):
Which Optmyzr Tools to Use
Automated/Smart Bidding
Optimize Target CPA: Modify the target CPA for high-performing ad groups. Reduce the gap between your target and actual performance to increase conversions. Help Article ↗️
Optimize Target ROAS: Modify the target ROAS for high-performing ad groups. Reduce the gap between your target and actual performance to increase conversions. Help Article ↗️
Non-Converting Queries (Search): Find irrelevant search terms leading to clicks without conversions, then add them to your negative keywords list to prevent wasteful spend. Help Article ↗️
Campaign Experiments: See all experimental campaigns for a given account in one location. Keep track of your testing process and see relevant performance data. Help Article ↗️
Value-Based Bidding
Explore Traffic Segments: See a list of Google Analytics segments based on performance. Create a custom audience using one or more audiences for use in campaigns. Help Article ↗️
Score Traffic Segments: Rate a segment from 1–5 based on its value to the account’s business. This tool considers scores from your entire team. Help Article ↗️
Optimize Value Rules - VBB: Use the scores from Score Traffic Segments to get suggested bid adjustments when running Smart Bidding. For example, increase bids for people in the US by a given percentage. Help Article ↗️
Automations & Workflows
We offer a variety of pre-built strategies to deploy as automated rules — these frequently exceed what you can achieve in Google Ads — or you can customize/build your own. Some of the readymade strategies for automated bidding include:
Audit Maximize Conversions bid strategy
Add non-converting queries as negative keywords
Optimize target CPA for ad groups running Smart Bidding
Optimize target ROAS for ad groups running Smart Bidding
Optimize target CPA for campaigns running Maximize Conversions
Optimize target ROAS for campaigns running Maximize Conversion Value
Alerts keep you informed about account performance even when you’re not actively monitoring a campaign or account. Optmyzr lets you receive alerts where you do your work like email, Slack, and Microsoft Teams:
Budget-level alerts: To know when you’re in danger of overspending
Metric-level alerts: To know when a metric is trending downward, such as Cost or Cost Per Conversion