Auction-time Bidding Strategy is Now Available on Search Ads 360

Google has opened the Auction-time bidding streategy to all advertisers

Auction-time bidding for Google Search campaigns is now live on the Search Ads 360 for marketers to take advantage of Google’s Machine learning.

The enterprise-level search management tool of the Google Marketing Platform, Google Search Ads 360 which enables advertisers and agencies to be able to manage digital campaigns across multiple search engines has added auction-bidding for bids on Google Search.

This is Google’s effort to aid their ongoing promotion of Smart biddings. Google has been trying to push this feature for a long time now. For Google Search Ads 360 users, this feature would provide them the opportunity to use the smart bidding option for the Google Search campaigns.

Smart bidding feature is based on the machine-learning of Google to make real-time bids based on various signals like device, location & time of the day to understand the probability of the user converting.

Auction time bidding analyzes various factors like the account history, number of leads/conversions recorded by floodlight, Google Marketing Platform’s conversion tracking system and the other possible signals which can predict the intent of the customer if it can convert or not. In contrary, a Search Ads 360 bid strategy mainly focuses on the data of the campaign performance 4 times a day to set the bid for a particular keyword or recommend any bid adjustments.

In case you are worried about whether you will be able to continue with your cross-channel bidding strategies by Search Ads 360, let me clarify that you will still be able to keep using the same in spite of keeping auction-time bidding activated in your account.

Auction-time bidding strategy is available for all Google Search campaigns. As per the below screenshot, you need to select your target KPI for the campaign and check the button below which says “Auction-time bidding”.

It has also been made available for Shopping campaigns as well but is in Beta version now.

Since the auction-time bidding strategy is purely based on Google’s machine learning methods, it will gather data for the initial 7 to 10 days of making the feature live and then only it will start implementing the learnings to adjust bids.

Google in an official statement mentioned that, before launching the feature to all, it tasted the same with significant number of advertisers and all of them observed at least 15 to 30% uplift in conversions or ROI.

It is to be seen now as to how does this new feature work and if the machine learnings of Google are really trustworthy.