How do you decide the best CPA or ROAS target for a Search Ads 360 bid strategy? The best practice is to start with a target that closely matches your current CPA or ROAS. That is, establish a baseline based on current spend, and check if you can use bid strategies to improve upon your baseline.
For example, if you've been spending $25 on search advertising for each car rental, the best practice is to start off your bid strategy with a $25 CPA. This is helpful to avoid spend fluctuations at the start of your bid strategy.
Search Ads 360 provides a couple of options for finding a starting target:
- Bid strategy simulators and performance center forecasts : Bid simulators help you see how different bids might change your ads’ weekly performance. A performance plan shows you the best opportunity for your spend by modeling the best budget allocation across the campaigns in a group. You can also learn how changes to campaigns might affect key metrics and overall performance.
- Campaign report: You can use campaign level reports to find your current CPA or ROAS.
Use a campaign report to find the current target
Instead of performing the calculations to find the current target, let Bid strategy simulators and performance center forecasts do the calculations for you.
- Go to the campaigns view and filter the specific campaigns you wish to see.
- Add the following columns to your report.
- Conversions if your goal is to increase the number of conversions
- Conv. Value if your goal is to increase revenue
- Make sure the date range is the past 30 days.
Note: Bidding considers "conversions" and "conv. value" columns, and this should be taken into account when changing conversion goals.
After you establish a starting target and let the bid strategy run for a couple of weeks. Then you can use Search Ads 360 to forecast results of your performance plan to try out other targets and view the tradeoffs between them. For example, you can start a bid strategy with a $25 CPA target and let it run for a couple of weeks. After the bid strategy is established, a forecast can estimate whether a lower or higher spend might be more efficient for your business.
Controlling spend
Search Ads 360 will optimize your campaign spend for days of the month when you’re more likely to get clicks and conversions, like when search traffic is higher or when we predict higher ROI for your ads. This means that on some days you might not reach your average daily budget, and on others you might exceed it.
But the best way to control the amount spent by a bid strategy is through the ROI target that you specify for the bid strategy.
Think of the bid strategy's target as the ideal spend amount, and the campaign budget as a stopgap to prevent the bid strategy from going beyond the absolute maximum you'd ever want to spend.
That's another reason why it's best to start with a target that matches your current spend amount. It's likely that the bid strategy will spend the same as the current amount, or within a range that's close to the current amount.