About cross-account bid strategies

Cross-account bid strategies allow you to create, monitor, and manage Smart Bidding portfolio strategies at the Google Ads manager account (MCC) level.

Cross-account bid strategies may be helpful to you if you have multiple serving customer IDs under an MCC. Similar to portfolio bid strategies in a single child account, cross-account bid strategies are automated, goal-driven bid strategies that help you optimize bids across multiple customer IDs or campaigns while using Smart Bidding.

You can use cross account bid strategies for Target CPA, Target ROAS, Maximize conversions, Maximize conversion value, Maximize Clicks and Target impression share bid strategies on Search campaigns, and Target ROAS bid strategies on Shopping campaigns.

Benefits

Using cross-account bid strategies can give your portfolio bid strategies better performance at a more aggregated level by:

• Automatically setting bids for every auction to help you reach your performance goals.
• Providing a single place for you to quickly change bidding settings for all campaigns that use a single portfolio bid strategy.
• For Smart Bidding strategies, providing more conversion volume/value at the same overall target across campaigns in multiple Customer Ids by merging them together into a single portfolio.

How it works

Cross-account bid strategies offer a central place for performance to be analyzed and evaluated at the bid strategy level.

Once you create a cross-account bid strategy, it will be stored in your MCC’s Shared library. This is the central location for managing your portfolio bid strategies and tracking their performance.

If you’re adding a cross-account bid strategy to a Shopping campaign, that campaign will continue to focus on campaign-level targets even if it’s part of a portfolio bid strategy.

How to access and unlink your cross-account bid strategy

To view the performance of cross-account bid strategies and to add new campaigns, you should be logged in through the manager account where the portfolio is saved. If you have additional manager accounts higher in the hierarchy, you can log in through those as well.

Campaigns can be removed from the cross-account bid strategy from any Google Ads account that has access to the campaign. If you unlink a Google Ads account from a manager account that has the cross-account portfolio bid strategy saved, any campaigns in the Google Ads account will be marked as having an invalid bid strategy type and stop showing ads until you choose a new bidding strategy for those campaigns.

Each cross-account bid strategy portfolio can only contain campaigns of the same currency. You can choose any currency used across your accounts, but you won’t be able to change your portfolio strategy currency after you create it.

Set up a cross-account bid strategy

Note: The instructions below are part of the new design for the Google Ads user experience. To use the previous design, click the "Appearance" icon, and select Use previous design. If you're using the previous version of Google Ads, review the Quick reference map or use the Search bar in the top navigation panel of Google Ads to find the page you’re searching for.

1. In your Google Ads manager account, click the Tools icon  and then click Budgets and bidding drop down in the section menu.
2. Click Bid strategies.
3. Click the plus button , and choose the type of bid strategy you’d like to create.
4. Enter the settings for your new cross-campaign bid strategy, and select your campaigns.
5. Click Save.

Note: You’ll only be able to attach a campaign or view the bid strategy report if the cross-account bid strategy is owned by the MCC. Bid strategies owned by a single serving customer ID cannot be used outside of that customer ID.

Related links

• About Google Ads Manager Accounts
• Create a portfolio bid strategy
• Find your bid strategy report