-
PPC agencies: manual or Smart Bidding
1. Do big agencies managing several client accounts use any Smart Bidding? Or the greater control of Manual is still necessary for fine tuning?
2. When you create a new account for a client, when do you go with manual, and when do you switch to Smart Bidding, if ever?
3. When you decide to use Smart Bidding, do you go for Max. Conversions/tCPA/tROAS, or it completely depends on the situation? If so, what are the deciding factors? Do you ever run experiments to check how they perform against eachother?
4. Do you have an initial period, when for example in the first month you go with broader settings (eg. Max. Conversions without tCPA), or Manual with high bids to get more data to see what’s possible?
-
1 Reply
-
All your questions boil down to doing what makes sense based on the business, country and what is being sold. Most ad accounts should use some smart bidding and automation. There is no one right answer…. this work is not black and white.
1. Use what gets the best result for clients.
2. An ad account with no smart bidding or automation is likely falling behind.
3. Depends on what the client sells and data you will be able to get. Stage of growth of a business plays a role
4. Only go broad if you are fine with Google potentially blowing through your ad spend with little to no results
-
Are you a PPC Manager or a walking talking index of CPC’s. You will never know more than the system.
-
I work with mid-size to enterprise clients and I would estimate 80-100% of the Google campaigns use some form of automated bidding in the accounts.
-
I use manual bidding to ramp up. If the client gets over 30, even better over 100 conversions, automated bidding often gives good results. If you don’t have 30+conversions per month tied to actual value for the business, auto bidding will just make your cost per click about 2-3x what it needs to be and you still won’t get conversions.
-
Hi u/rubka430
Your questions let’s see, there are great responses already and as you can see it varies wildly.
1: this depends on your access and knowledge of tools that scale. Spend doesn’t matter as much as quantity when it comes to tools. That said, sa360 is a fully automated platform that sits on manual cpc settings in platform and or automated.
Strategy is super important and while some folks got things in their head it’s not super scaleable, so you minimize platforms and tools become less necessary as much as automation becomes critical.
2: This depends, it’s your art, there is no right way. No matter what is said. If there was or were a right or wrong way, only one agency would exist “Google themselves ❤️”. Define your strategy on paper, groom it with the partner and go from there. Factors like budget, media mix, etc can be deciding factors.
3: Your on it, it depends. All targets are driven by an objective and what data you have access to, to help model your bidding after. Yes always run a test, A/B/C/D etc…. for ads to bidding strategies. Some models are only in beta and very advertisers have access to test say manual versus pMax. Pretty dope test though in a controlled way ❤️
4: Your vertical, competition, ngram use all matter here to include budgets and bids. No one way will give you what you need consistently; a great example is knowing your brand has the same name as another large brand or well known brand. Though you sell two distinctive products it’s understanding your market, to help you determine what you can do. In the above example pMax might lean in very hard to the larger brand, even though you are local so it will require a differing perspective.
All of this depends great questions and good luck on your journey
-
It isn’t necessarily about smart vs manual bidding, it’s about getting your ads show in placements that lead to sales. Bid strategies are tools to accomplish that task. If you can effectively attribute purchase value to clicks, Google’s smart bidding can do a great job at driving sales. If you don’t have effective conversion tracking that differentiates good from poor leads, then smart bidding might not work because it’s only as good as the input you give it and a manual process could work better. Also, it’s based on the incremental value of the ad placement. For me, I always use manual bids for branded search traffic because I find smart bidding often inflated branded CPCs. I’ve seen cases where smart bidding drove $300+ CPCs on branded search traffic (tragic). I use manual bids and target a 90% impression share for my core brand terms that are the least incremental (those sales would likely happen without the ad) as I typically see the difference between 90% and 99% impression share for core branded terms averages to approximately 50% lower ad spend with less than 2% incremental revenue loss. However, for non-branded traffic for an e-commerce site smart bidding is typically the best option. Do your best to A/B test and go with the best result. Test everything. There’s no single blueprint to PPC. Good luck!
-
Go with manual for bigger budgets you want to test which cost cap is best only for bigger budgets.
-
The bidding method is variable and dependent on the campaign purpose and client goal, campaign lifecycle, ad spend, average monthly conversions, and more.
It sometimes makes sense to use manual to start if your intention is to eventually switch to an automated method – if you don’t expect that many conversions, e.g. less than a dozen in the first week or so.
[https://www.tenthousandfootview.com/the-right-google-bidding-strategy-for-you/](https://www.tenthousandfootview.com/the-right-google-bidding-strategy-for-you/)
About 90% of the Google Ads campaigns we run use automated bidding. The ones that don’t usually generate less than 25 conversions per month. Over on MS Ads, on the other hand, zero automated bidding, it’s clearly not up to snuff yet.
-
Thank you for all the answers! As I understand, unless there are some special circumstances (very limited budget, very specific keywords, low number of conversions or no conversion/value data), Manual is already an obsolete method, Smart Bidding just works better for most campaigns. Seems like an easy way to manage Google Ads, as setting optimal bids for keywords seems the most difficult task for me about Google Ads. If Smart Bidding can work better for almost every case, why do a lot of companies still struggle with performance? There are not so many things you can screw up if you have decent ads and conversion reporting working properly.
Do you also count Manual eCPC as Smart Bidding when you mention “some form of automation”, or it’s rarely used just like full Manual?
My experience on the matter: we ran experiments with Manual/Smart Bidding campaigns. When we started an experiment, Smart Bidding usually performed better, but during the experiment, the Manual bidding campaign showed worse results compared to what we have seen before the experiment. This led us to suspect Smart Bidding is “cherry picking” the conversions away from Manual during the experiments, as Google wants us to go with their own recommendations. When the experiment ended and I switched the campaign to Smart Bidding, the performance wasn’t as good as during the experiment… But maybe more testing or different experiment conditions are necessary to confirm these suspicions.
Log in to reply.