Getting Started with Automated Bid Strategies in SA360

Optimizing your campaigns to ensure you’re getting the most out of your current bid strategy can be tedious work. Luckily, automated bidding strategies in tools like Search Ads 360 (SA360) can help ease the burden.  

Interested in learning more about how to use SA360 bid strategies to boost awareness or hit your revenue goals? Let’s dive in. 

What is a Bid Strategy and How Does it Work?

Automated bid strategies can pick up on daily or reoccurring patterns, allowing the interface to update bids accordingly and to make more informed bid adjustments that will take advantage of peak times for your specific campaigns. 

To determine the best bid, Google reviews performance history for online conversions, biddable items and available offline conversions. Bids are reviewed every six hours, so four times a day, and are refreshed for optimal performance. Google will never make drastic changes or adjustments to your bids during these updates, as it’s harder to predict the impact they will have on performance.

Finding the Right Bid Strategy

To determine the right bid strategy, it’s important to know what goals you want to achieve. If you’re seeking to increase awareness, consider impression share or ad position. If your goal is higher ROI, focus on a revenue or conversion-based campaign goal. 

Google also allows you to create a monthly spend strategy if you’re working with a fixed budget. If your campaigns are already live, then you have most likely already established your goals for these campaigns and can proceed to creating your portfolios.

Streamline Your Data With Portfolios

Combining like-campaigns and grouping them into portfolios will not only help you get things organized but optimize performance more efficiently as well. Portfolios allow Google to gain better insights and bid information across your campaigns. Google will optimize bids to the goal of the portfolio itself and will not look singularly at the campaigns included in it. 

Pro-Tip: Make sure to group like Campaigns with similar/same goals. 

It’s important to note that the bigger the portfolio, the more historical data Google has to glean information from and the more opportunities to test and improve on your portfolio’s performance. You want to offer the most biddable item (i.e., your keywords or product groups) variety as possible within your portfolios, so keep that in mind as you work through your portfolio creation. 

Is There a Difference Between Bid Strategies in Google Ads and SA360?

Yes! If you’re looking for a streamlined and more efficient bid optimization process across your paid search portfolio, it’s worth reviewing what SA360 offers. You can read up more on it here.

If you have any questions about bid strategies, feel free to contact us. We’re happy to help!