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Your guide to Smart Bidding

Smart Bidding is a set of automated bidding strategies that use Google AI to optimize for conversions or conversion value. Smart Bidding sets precise bids for each and every auction to help drive higher conversion volume or conversion value at a cost efficiency that is comparable to or better than existing performance goals.

Target CPA, Target ROAS, Maximize conversions and Maximize conversion value are all Smart Bidding strategies.

Target Impression share and Max clicks are also automated bid strategies but don’t include auction time bidding.

Diagram explaining when to use Smart Bidding and when to use Automated Bidding

Benefits of Smart Bidding

Google Ads automated bidding helps you optimize bids at scale across your business goals. Smart Bidding uses Google AI technology. Automated bidding gives you:

  • Bid strategies that align to your goals: Choose from a variety of bid strategies to meet your business objectives, conversion goals, and conversion value goals.
  • True auction-time bid optimization: Smart Bidding optimizes bids for every auction, helping you set more precise bids tailored to each user’s search context and meet your performance goals more effectively.
  • Query-level performance modeling: Smart Bidding uses search query-level conversion data across your account to help solve data scarcity that individual keywords may face. This allows the algorithms to bid more accurately on low-volume keywords or keywords that are still building performance history.
  • A richer set of contextual signals: In addition to evaluating key signals like device, location, and time of day, Smart Bidding accounts for other signals like browser, operating system, language, and many more. This helps incorporate the search context and conversion likelihood of each auction into every bid. It also considers signal combinations that have a statistically significant impact on conversion rate, which individual bid adjustments may not capture. Learn more about automated bidding signals
  • Algorithms that keep learning: Smart Bidding continuously updates your bidding algorithms to align with changes in performance and adapts to your business’ specific conversion cycle to know how to heavily weigh recent versus historical data.
Tip:
Check out the Search Automation technical guide to learn more about the signals Google uses, how queries match to keywords, how using AI makes keyword matching more effective, and what you can do to improve performance.
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