The Bidding and Budgets section allows you to define your bidding strategy, set any bid limit if needed, and define how much you'd like to spend on a specific ad group daily. Keep in mind that these settings should be set hand-in-hand with your campaign goal to ensure maximum results.
Bidding Strategy
Selecting the right bidding strategy is one of the main keys to campaign success. There are four bidding strategies available. Depending on your primary campaign goal, you can use your ad group's daily budget to maximize Conversions, Impressions, Clicks, or Engagement.
The bidding strategy is automatically selected based on your campaign’s primary objective – no worries, you can always adjust the strategy if needed. Our algorithm will ensure appropriate bidding optimization to reach the set goals.
For the Conversion Bidding strategy, a pixel conversion definition (goal) must be selected. This pixel must accurately track events to ensure our algorithm learns and optimizes toward the selected goal.
Recommendations for setting up a Conversion Bidding strategy:
The conversion definition selected at the campaign level is meant to track the primary objective. When setting up your ad group, select a conversion definition that best reflects this objective, as this is the primary signal that our algorithm will use to optimize your ad group.
For soft conversions as the main KPI, we recommend setting upper-to-mid conversion funnel goals on the campaign and ad group (for example, click on more info or open a tab). This is preferable to merely landing on a page, which might be too ‘soft’ and won’t yield the expected results.
For hard conversions as the main KPI, we recommend placing a bottom conversion funnel goal as the campaign goal. Start with the soft upper-to-mid conversion funnel goal on the ad group level, and then later (after the campaign receives 20-50 hard conversions), replace the ad group conversion definition with a harder conversion goal (such as opening a checkout, placing an item in the shopping cart) to further optimize the ad group flight. After the learning period is complete, other ad groups and campaigns using the same conversion definition will inherit previously learned conclusions.
Having a different conversion definition set on a campaign goal and in the ad group bidding strategy is a valid option.
The bidding strategy, called Engagement, allows you to optimize for site engagement goals. It automatically optimizes your campaign for traffic where we see the highest engagement rates in our network. This is just the first step to supporting engagement optimization for specific engagement goals.
You can also set a bid limit to maximize impressions, clicks, or engagement, but keep in mind this could hurt the pacing of your campaign.
Manual Bidding
The Manual Bidding strategy (formerly known as Target Bidding) can be selected by clicking the Set Bidding Manually option. It is tailored to fit niche cases where the experienced dashboard user expects to have full control over bids. As such, it requires significantly more attention from the user during ad group flight than our default Automatic Bidding Strategy.
Manual bidding supports only CPC and CPM target strategies. You need to provide the exact target bid CPC/CPM, and our algorithm will aim to buy at the set bid consistently. Maximizing conversions or engagement as a strategy is unavailable in the manual bidding section, as these rely heavily on automated optimization algorithms.
Daily Budget
Every bidding strategy has an option to select a daily budget. Please note that the ability to set that feature depends on the Budget Optimization setting at the campaign level.
Once the daily budget has been capped, your content will no longer be distributed to our network of publisher sites. However, an end-user can still click on content that was served before the daily budget was fulfilled. As a result, you may be charged up to twenty percent (20%) more than the pre-designated daily budget for impressions delivered during this time. While the daily spend might exceed the designated daily budget of the ad group, the campaign budget cannot exceed a predetermined limit.