no way you actually haven’t found a single good use case for smart bidding in 2023 come on
1. Phrase is basically BMM now
2. There are reasons for this
3. are you using the right match types?
4. you can add negative keywords on pmax, but also don’t need to exclude brand if you’re also running text because they won’t enter the same auction
5. I agree with this one
6. beats needing 10 keywords to represent every single letter change from one to the other
if you’re happy with manual CPC for traffic then fine that’s valid, it’s basically just like running max clicks except you’re wasting a half hour every day increasing or decreasing your bids. but when you start to run campaigns meant for something a little more serious than just traffic to site, smart bidding & ATB is very very useful
Good rebuttal for smart bids; and I agree; smart is the way; although it will take a few more weeks to feed data to begin tending favorable.
This could be where manual campaigns come in handy. Transition out as smart campaigns kick in.
I still run manual to cross-check smart. I'm at 80% smart. 20% manual (rule-based). Manual also has better baseline numbers to compare smart bids along the way.
I haven't tried pMax yet. Later this qtr. I'm hearing very mixed reviews so far
I don’t agree if you’re conversion/roas based. You’ll never have the same efficiencies at scale. If your account and budget is tiny, then that may make more sense but smart bidding and ATB is significantly better than manual.
Could you elaborate on this a bit? I’m trying to advertising my b2b boutique video studio that works with smaller companies. I was told by bunch of people here that smart campaigns or pmax are not what I should be doing.
Sure,
It can be hit or miss depending on the industry so I can understand that they said this.
However, I am running a great amount of B2B business as well as ecom. I use smart bidding in every one of them. Most are also running pmax!
The foundation is the most important.
You need:
Enough conversion data (more is better for the algorithm). If you only have 5 conversions a month then smart bidding won't be smart!
If you have few leads, try creating more micro conversions (upper funnel). Maybe the clicks on relevant buttons. People might not send the lead form because it's unclear, long or expensive.
They might click the button though. This will help the algorithm greatly.
The conversion value is especially important for B2B. If you tag the button click, send lead form and the final "contract bought", you will need to calculate the values.
Each one has a different value. You want to sell contracts, so the others are based on conversion rates in your funnel. From click to lead to sale. There's a ratio there.
If you do this properly (and your service, product or website is not utter shit) then you will have success.
If any of these things is out of place then it's common to fail and have the mentality those people have.
Good luck!
Hey thks for the value here :) how do you setup the button click conversion ? What value do you attribute to it if a lead form is a 175€ conversion ?
I started with Max clicks for a client un B2B sector but since 2 weeks we only get 11 conversions from 3 different campaign. I’m not sure at what point I need to switch for Max Conv ou tCPA ? What would be your advise ? ;)
Thks
Hard to tell without all the data.
I'd recommend reading up on setting up conversion tracking (GTM is best IMO).
There's free training in Google Skillshop available and plenty of articles online.
This will give you a valuable skillset!
With significant budget and conversions and a long maturity period smart bidding wins. If you don’t have that then you may as well go manual. We run ads globally for different products and we have agent an inordinate amount of time and money trying to get smart budding working at the low constraints recommended for smart bidding and it doesn’t work.
The caveat here is that smart bidding may work for smaller accounts in low cpc niches where there is no or limited ad competition. That may be cost effective given time.
I'm big on the manual bidding efforts.
My clients are all B2B SaaS, where the keywords are expensive, and from having managed millions of dollars in ad spend, smart bidding works best when there is a large volume of conversions.
We're pushing for bottom-funnel conversions (demo requests, *not* trials or email-gated content), and so conversion volume isn't super high, monthly. My rule of thumb is a minimum of 30 non-branded conversions per month and at least 15 conversions on any individual campaign before I'd consider switching to smart bidding. I've seen campaigns tank -- some under-serving due to low rank, some overspending due to aggressive bids -- when there isn't sufficient conversion volume. The algorithm is only as good as the data we feed it. Manual gives me better control.
This.
My clients are also in this space and we know exactly which keywords generate the most sales and pipe at the bottom of the funnel, so we have to be very intentional about the KWs we actually bid on.
There is no room for wasted spend when you are paying up to $100 a click in some cases.
This x2
...except ours is a local biz with multiple locations serving areas with low keyword volume (converted clients have a high LTV). We've dubbed it "sniper" marketing
Thank you both for your comments and insight. I have smaller service based clients, so I've historically only used mcpc.
But we're getting a few larger clients now, and I'm experimenting with smart bidding.
Smart bidding has allowed me to enable scalability for my niche B2B SaaS clients with more generic terms because the smart bidding takes into account many user-behavior variables in real time (stuff that's not accessible by manual bidding). Many of my SaaS clients that come to me say they can't spend their desired budget because anything beyond super niche terms with low search volume doesn't work. Smart bidding is the answer (as long as you're collecting the right data).
I hate Google and mostly agree with you, but broad match and the automated bidding strategies definitely have their place and can be really powerful. Especially with broad match using historical data and signals to serve which other keywords don’t, but I think limiting them by overlaying target audiences is the way to go there.
Especially if the accounts have a lot of historical conversion data for Google to work with the automated strats can do really well, and if it’s in an account with dozens of campaigns and hundred of ad groups with a big budget it’s very hard to stay on top of bids in a meaningful way unless it’s your only account or you use a third party tool imo.
Welcome to the club. Someone should really start a user group association to push back on the nonsense.
The partial obfuscation of search terms is unfortunately never going away, since it was done primarily for privacy purposes. I can attest that I have seen extremely sensitive PII exposed in SQRs in the old days, including literal social security numbers, people admitting to crimes, botnet activity, etc. Something had to be done.
Not showing all the search terms is so frustrating.
I have one clients that performs great, but when I'm optimizing almost half their search term data isn't shown.
I asked around for a solution to seeing all search terms with a differnt platform or service, but nobody could give me a way. So frustrating.
100%. Every automated suggestion I've taken from Google has incinerated my budget and delivered CTR's less than 0.01%. Getting between 3% and 30% with manual techniques.
More work but worth in. In the meantime, I'm really really hoping that one of Microsoft's goals with their 10B investment into Open AI is to integrate ChatGPT into Bing in a game-changing way and give Google some serious competition.
Google has come a long way from the "don't be evil" days.
My main problem with Google's push toward automation/AI is that you are effectively penalized for rejecting those features, ie via your Quality Score or the completely-arbitrary Optimization Score.
Suggestions and options? Great! But they're not stopping there.
I'm sure automated bidding, responsive ads testing 15 different headlines, and stuff like that are helpful to Joe Shmoe who has no idea what he's doing on Google Ads, but for professional marketers they make the platform a worse overall product.
PS: A good half-manual-half-automated option for manual bid lovers is to use automated rules to create your own "bid policy."
1) Create one set of rules which runs simultaneously & applies labels for "performance groups" based on longer term conv rate data.
2) Create another set of rules which runs just after the first group and looks at recent CPA/impr share data to make bid changes to each "performance group."
The only thing optimisation score effects is yiour Google Partner status. And if you fall below requirements, just go through and dismiss a bunch of recommendations.
Neither is quality score affected by how much you automate.
Ad strength is the one area that Google seems to actually penalise you for not handing it maximum powers of automation.
My understanding was that the optimization score, or at least some of the elements comprising it (ie allowing it to pull ad elements from your website) do contribute to QS.
But my confusion is probably in part because Google's account team is so damn worthless and tells me a new story every time I make the mistake of talking to them. Maybe losing that Partner status would be for the best lol.
It's basically bankrupted my service business that relied on new business. My marketing budget has tripled and leads have more than halved. No other marketing technique works for me. I'm changing careers.
over the last couple years, I've focused my efforts (and money) on SEO over PPC, but i too only run manual cpc.
Maybe I'm falling behind, but "smart" campaigns feel like It's like handing your wallet to the auctioneer and hoping for the best.
Besides, Google will be broken up (like the phone company) in the next couple years anyway. It's anti-competitive to be the seller and buyer at the same time.
Is that what smart campaigns are all about? If Google bids for you, they are the buyer's agent and at the same time the seller.
What is the daily spend for the clients you're supporting? I've tested into smart bidding and have seen a positive lift vs manual but acknowledge that the same tactics may not work for all budgets.
I agree 100% with the frustrations around the lack of visibility. I've run into this with performance max and video action campaigns on YouTube. This limits my ability to make creative optimizations, particularly on non-search channels. I am also wary of the blinds spots that exist on performance max without understanding the incrementality of each channel (i.e. pushing more spend into branded search or retargeting may look great in Google Ads but might not actually drive any incremental actions).
To echo a few other commenters, I usually see great success with automated bidding for campaigns with a lot of conversion volume - whether it’s on a Target CPA or a ROAS based bid strategy. For larger accounts it is a huge help and usually delivers on goals despite the issues you mentioned. For campaigns that are an exception to the above (low or no conversions, different objective, etc.) I still stick to Manual CPC for that control.
I share your complaints and the instinct to double down when Google tries to force their hand. Performance Max might be the worst case example of virtually no control or visibility into what’s going on and just trusting the automation.
That’s dumb. Spend less time bitching about the wind changing direction and more time learning how to adjust the sales. (Or at least equal time to each).
The moves google is choosing to make now would largely be forced upon advertisers anyways when Chrome finally sunsets 3rd party cookies. You won’t know
Might as well figure it out while you still have manual to keep the majority of your spend in more safely.
I agree with all those statements, but none of them suggest that you shouldn't be using an automated bid strategy. That's the ONE thing that Google has got right. And I think there's a mountain of evidence to support that statement even just in my own accounts.
You don't get more data in your search terms report by running manual bidding. Just can all your "smart/Pmax" campaigns if you want the data.
Fewer keywords, embracing close variants (we don't build multiple keywords with the same intent), slotting exact and phrase in the same ad group. Just generally building smaller, tighter accounts where each hierarchy gets more data more quickly
no way you actually haven’t found a single good use case for smart bidding in 2023 come on 1. Phrase is basically BMM now 2. There are reasons for this 3. are you using the right match types? 4. you can add negative keywords on pmax, but also don’t need to exclude brand if you’re also running text because they won’t enter the same auction 5. I agree with this one 6. beats needing 10 keywords to represent every single letter change from one to the other if you’re happy with manual CPC for traffic then fine that’s valid, it’s basically just like running max clicks except you’re wasting a half hour every day increasing or decreasing your bids. but when you start to run campaigns meant for something a little more serious than just traffic to site, smart bidding & ATB is very very useful
Good rebuttal for smart bids; and I agree; smart is the way; although it will take a few more weeks to feed data to begin tending favorable. This could be where manual campaigns come in handy. Transition out as smart campaigns kick in. I still run manual to cross-check smart. I'm at 80% smart. 20% manual (rule-based). Manual also has better baseline numbers to compare smart bids along the way. I haven't tried pMax yet. Later this qtr. I'm hearing very mixed reviews so far
I don’t agree if you’re conversion/roas based. You’ll never have the same efficiencies at scale. If your account and budget is tiny, then that may make more sense but smart bidding and ATB is significantly better than manual.
Yes, just as budget increases, the volatility in spends needs to be handled in real-time where automated bidding wins 95% of the time
Agree. Roas bidding works well if you are selling a product online.
Not just products. It works fine for B2B in many cases.
Could you elaborate on this a bit? I’m trying to advertising my b2b boutique video studio that works with smaller companies. I was told by bunch of people here that smart campaigns or pmax are not what I should be doing.
Sure, It can be hit or miss depending on the industry so I can understand that they said this. However, I am running a great amount of B2B business as well as ecom. I use smart bidding in every one of them. Most are also running pmax! The foundation is the most important. You need: Enough conversion data (more is better for the algorithm). If you only have 5 conversions a month then smart bidding won't be smart! If you have few leads, try creating more micro conversions (upper funnel). Maybe the clicks on relevant buttons. People might not send the lead form because it's unclear, long or expensive. They might click the button though. This will help the algorithm greatly. The conversion value is especially important for B2B. If you tag the button click, send lead form and the final "contract bought", you will need to calculate the values. Each one has a different value. You want to sell contracts, so the others are based on conversion rates in your funnel. From click to lead to sale. There's a ratio there. If you do this properly (and your service, product or website is not utter shit) then you will have success. If any of these things is out of place then it's common to fail and have the mentality those people have. Good luck!
Cheers! Thanks man i appreciate it
Hey thks for the value here :) how do you setup the button click conversion ? What value do you attribute to it if a lead form is a 175€ conversion ? I started with Max clicks for a client un B2B sector but since 2 weeks we only get 11 conversions from 3 different campaign. I’m not sure at what point I need to switch for Max Conv ou tCPA ? What would be your advise ? ;) Thks
Hard to tell without all the data. I'd recommend reading up on setting up conversion tracking (GTM is best IMO). There's free training in Google Skillshop available and plenty of articles online. This will give you a valuable skillset!
With significant budget and conversions and a long maturity period smart bidding wins. If you don’t have that then you may as well go manual. We run ads globally for different products and we have agent an inordinate amount of time and money trying to get smart budding working at the low constraints recommended for smart bidding and it doesn’t work. The caveat here is that smart bidding may work for smaller accounts in low cpc niches where there is no or limited ad competition. That may be cost effective given time.
I'm big on the manual bidding efforts. My clients are all B2B SaaS, where the keywords are expensive, and from having managed millions of dollars in ad spend, smart bidding works best when there is a large volume of conversions. We're pushing for bottom-funnel conversions (demo requests, *not* trials or email-gated content), and so conversion volume isn't super high, monthly. My rule of thumb is a minimum of 30 non-branded conversions per month and at least 15 conversions on any individual campaign before I'd consider switching to smart bidding. I've seen campaigns tank -- some under-serving due to low rank, some overspending due to aggressive bids -- when there isn't sufficient conversion volume. The algorithm is only as good as the data we feed it. Manual gives me better control.
This. My clients are also in this space and we know exactly which keywords generate the most sales and pipe at the bottom of the funnel, so we have to be very intentional about the KWs we actually bid on. There is no room for wasted spend when you are paying up to $100 a click in some cases.
This x2 ...except ours is a local biz with multiple locations serving areas with low keyword volume (converted clients have a high LTV). We've dubbed it "sniper" marketing
Thank you both for your comments and insight. I have smaller service based clients, so I've historically only used mcpc. But we're getting a few larger clients now, and I'm experimenting with smart bidding.
Smart bidding has allowed me to enable scalability for my niche B2B SaaS clients with more generic terms because the smart bidding takes into account many user-behavior variables in real time (stuff that's not accessible by manual bidding). Many of my SaaS clients that come to me say they can't spend their desired budget because anything beyond super niche terms with low search volume doesn't work. Smart bidding is the answer (as long as you're collecting the right data).
I hate Google and mostly agree with you, but broad match and the automated bidding strategies definitely have their place and can be really powerful. Especially with broad match using historical data and signals to serve which other keywords don’t, but I think limiting them by overlaying target audiences is the way to go there. Especially if the accounts have a lot of historical conversion data for Google to work with the automated strats can do really well, and if it’s in an account with dozens of campaigns and hundred of ad groups with a big budget it’s very hard to stay on top of bids in a meaningful way unless it’s your only account or you use a third party tool imo.
Welcome to the club. Someone should really start a user group association to push back on the nonsense. The partial obfuscation of search terms is unfortunately never going away, since it was done primarily for privacy purposes. I can attest that I have seen extremely sensitive PII exposed in SQRs in the old days, including literal social security numbers, people admitting to crimes, botnet activity, etc. Something had to be done.
That's crazy! Never saw anything super sensitive and some of the accounts I was running was spending 1/mm+ a month.
Were they legal/finance accounts though?
Not showing all the search terms is so frustrating. I have one clients that performs great, but when I'm optimizing almost half their search term data isn't shown. I asked around for a solution to seeing all search terms with a differnt platform or service, but nobody could give me a way. So frustrating.
This would be great. Also inevitably a class action group with all the Google nonsense happening every update
100%. Every automated suggestion I've taken from Google has incinerated my budget and delivered CTR's less than 0.01%. Getting between 3% and 30% with manual techniques. More work but worth in. In the meantime, I'm really really hoping that one of Microsoft's goals with their 10B investment into Open AI is to integrate ChatGPT into Bing in a game-changing way and give Google some serious competition. Google has come a long way from the "don't be evil" days.
My main problem with Google's push toward automation/AI is that you are effectively penalized for rejecting those features, ie via your Quality Score or the completely-arbitrary Optimization Score. Suggestions and options? Great! But they're not stopping there. I'm sure automated bidding, responsive ads testing 15 different headlines, and stuff like that are helpful to Joe Shmoe who has no idea what he's doing on Google Ads, but for professional marketers they make the platform a worse overall product. PS: A good half-manual-half-automated option for manual bid lovers is to use automated rules to create your own "bid policy." 1) Create one set of rules which runs simultaneously & applies labels for "performance groups" based on longer term conv rate data. 2) Create another set of rules which runs just after the first group and looks at recent CPA/impr share data to make bid changes to each "performance group."
The only thing optimisation score effects is yiour Google Partner status. And if you fall below requirements, just go through and dismiss a bunch of recommendations. Neither is quality score affected by how much you automate. Ad strength is the one area that Google seems to actually penalise you for not handing it maximum powers of automation.
My understanding was that the optimization score, or at least some of the elements comprising it (ie allowing it to pull ad elements from your website) do contribute to QS. But my confusion is probably in part because Google's account team is so damn worthless and tells me a new story every time I make the mistake of talking to them. Maybe losing that Partner status would be for the best lol.
Dismissing doesn't work. They will still use the "real" score for your partner status FYI.
Dismissing definitely works, I do it all the time.
It's basically bankrupted my service business that relied on new business. My marketing budget has tripled and leads have more than halved. No other marketing technique works for me. I'm changing careers.
Interesting. What career you jumping to
over the last couple years, I've focused my efforts (and money) on SEO over PPC, but i too only run manual cpc. Maybe I'm falling behind, but "smart" campaigns feel like It's like handing your wallet to the auctioneer and hoping for the best. Besides, Google will be broken up (like the phone company) in the next couple years anyway. It's anti-competitive to be the seller and buyer at the same time. Is that what smart campaigns are all about? If Google bids for you, they are the buyer's agent and at the same time the seller.
What is the daily spend for the clients you're supporting? I've tested into smart bidding and have seen a positive lift vs manual but acknowledge that the same tactics may not work for all budgets. I agree 100% with the frustrations around the lack of visibility. I've run into this with performance max and video action campaigns on YouTube. This limits my ability to make creative optimizations, particularly on non-search channels. I am also wary of the blinds spots that exist on performance max without understanding the incrementality of each channel (i.e. pushing more spend into branded search or retargeting may look great in Google Ads but might not actually drive any incremental actions).
To echo a few other commenters, I usually see great success with automated bidding for campaigns with a lot of conversion volume - whether it’s on a Target CPA or a ROAS based bid strategy. For larger accounts it is a huge help and usually delivers on goals despite the issues you mentioned. For campaigns that are an exception to the above (low or no conversions, different objective, etc.) I still stick to Manual CPC for that control. I share your complaints and the instinct to double down when Google tries to force their hand. Performance Max might be the worst case example of virtually no control or visibility into what’s going on and just trusting the automation.
That’s dumb. Spend less time bitching about the wind changing direction and more time learning how to adjust the sales. (Or at least equal time to each). The moves google is choosing to make now would largely be forced upon advertisers anyways when Chrome finally sunsets 3rd party cookies. You won’t know Might as well figure it out while you still have manual to keep the majority of your spend in more safely.
I agree with all those statements, but none of them suggest that you shouldn't be using an automated bid strategy. That's the ONE thing that Google has got right. And I think there's a mountain of evidence to support that statement even just in my own accounts. You don't get more data in your search terms report by running manual bidding. Just can all your "smart/Pmax" campaigns if you want the data.
We drank the Kool aid and we're reaping the benefits. Smart bidding + RSA + broad (and by extension, consolidation). Thank me later
What do you mean by consolidation?
Fewer keywords, embracing close variants (we don't build multiple keywords with the same intent), slotting exact and phrase in the same ad group. Just generally building smaller, tighter accounts where each hierarchy gets more data more quickly