Use AdWords Smart Bidding to Improve Your Ad Spend

How to Use AdWords Smart Bidding to Improve Your Ad Spend
Tap the power of machine learning to supercharge your PPC campaigns

The latest way to optimize your PPC campaigns is to use AdWords Smart Bidding. In this post, we’ll outline the basics of this automated approach to bidding on keywords – and offer a few more resources you can use to improve the results of your online advertising efforts.

Has your AdWords account been optimized to achieve maximum efficiency? Then you might be ready to tap the power of machine learning to supercharge your campaigns.

Here’s a sampling of what you can accomplish when you know how to use AdWords Smart Bidding:

  • Choose conversion action at the campaign level
  • Set bids to change automatically when sales start or stop
  • Optimize bids over multiple campaigns with a particular set of conversion actions
How does Smart Bidding Work?

How does Smart Bidding Work?

Your online advertising specialists will better understand the technical details, but you can think of Smart Bidding as a kind of “educated intuition.”

Essentially, there are both visible and invisible signals within AdWords segments. Visible signals include device, location, demographics, ad characteristics, and location intent. Hidden signals include: browser, operating system, and product attributes.

The machine learning within Smart Bidding identifies small but important details in the data that help better zero-in on a responsive prospect.

“Those signals are then cross-referenced with performance data, such as historical click- and conversion rates, and bids are increased or decreased to meet your selected target.” –Emma Franks, Instapage

Improve Your Ad Spend

Improve Your Ad Spend

Though smart bidding does leverage some pretty powerful technology, it still requires advertising specialists to implement – and carefully monitor the results.

Sometimes the tactic will drive a larger quantity of traffic to your landing page – and other times it may help drive less traffic of higher quality.

The takeaway is that smart bidding is powerful and here to stay – so it may be worth a closer look.

As exciting as it might sound to use AdWords Smart Bidding to gain an edge over your competition, be warned. It still requires a bit of work and testing. Testing is, in fact, one of the key ways to achieve success.

If you have experience running an AdWords account, explore some of the following posts:

Smart Bidding in Google Ads: An Up-to-Date Guide,” Daniel Gilbert, Search Engine Journal, May 2019
“6 Smart Bidding Tips That Will Take Your Google Ads To the Next Level,” Matthew Sidle, SEMRUSH, September 2018
8 Google Ads Hacks That’ll Double Your Conversion Rate,” Neil Patel, 2018
A Look Inside AdWords Smart Bidding & Automated Bidding Strategies,” Emma Franks, Instapage, July 2019
Top Marketing Trends For 2020,” Christian Thomson & Forbes Agency Council, Forbes, October 2019
Machine Learning, Smart Bidding and Google Ads,” Odolena Kostova, Medium.com, February 2019

Summary & Takeaways

The bottom line is, now that AdWords Smart Bidding is available, PPC marketers stand to benefit both in terms of time savings and overall results. If those are worthy goals for your brand to pursue, then your test campaigns await.

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