Understanding your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and clearly defining your goals is the foundation for successful Search Ads 360 automated bidding. Following these best practices ensures your bid strategies align perfectly with your business objectives, utilizing Google AI for optimal performance and maximizing results.
This guide covers aligning goals with business KPIs, selecting the right bid strategy type, and conversion data best practices.
On this page
- How to align your goals with business KPIs
- How to select the right conversion action
- Link goals to Bid Strategy selection
- Conversion data best practices
How to align your goals with business KPIs
Your bid strategy goals should align with your business KPIs as closely as possible. For the purposes of bidding, you'll want to consider 3 basic types of goals:
- Conversions or Revenue (ROI): If your goal is for customers to take a direct action on your site, like a purchase or lead, and you're using conversion tracking, focus on conversions. This is ideal for maximizing the number of conversions or the revenue generated.
- Traffic (Clicks): If you want to generate traffic to your website, focusing on clicks is ideal.
- Visibility (Impression Share): If you want to maximize visibility for your ads, focus on bidding for the top placements on the search results page.
How to select the right conversion action
The choice between upper-funnel and lower-funnel goals involves a trade-off primarily related to volume and conversion delay.
- Conversion volume: Refers to the total number of conversions recorded. Upper-funnel actions, such as "Lead" or "Add to Cart," occur earlier in the customer journey and therefore typically provide a higher volume of data points. In contrast, lower-funnel actions, like "Sale" or "Purchase," happen less frequently, resulting in a lower volume.
- Conversion delay: It’s the time lag between a user’s initial click and the completion of the conversion action. Upper-funnel actions naturally have a lower conversion delay because they occur sooner after the click, for example, filling out a quick lead form, while lower-funnel actions, which require more consideration or time, like a final purchase, result in a higher conversion delay.
Conversion actions can be grouped into upper-funnel and lower-funnel goals, which have trade-offs regarding volume and conversion delay:
| Conversion goal type | Example | Key characteristics |
| Upper funnel | “Lead” or “Add to Cart” | Higher volume and lower conversion delay |
| Lower funnel | "Sale” or “Purchase” | Lower volume and higher conversion delay |
Example
A purchase conversion is essential for tracking return on investment (ROI) because it measures revenue. However, purchases are lower-funnel goals. This means they have lower volume and higher conversion delay. Optimizing for “Leads” offers higher data volume. This helps optimize the bid strategy. However, "Leads" may not directly reflect eventual revenue.
Search Ads 360 supports the following "Conversion Sources”:
Link goals to Bid Strategy selection
After you've defined your goals, you can select the corresponding bid strategy type:
| Goal | Bid strategy |
|---|---|
|
Get more conversions with your target CPA. |
Target CPA automatically sets bids to help get as many conversions as possible at the target cost-per-action (CPA) you set. Some conversions may cost more or less than your target. Learn more About Target CPA bidding. |
|
Meet a target return on ad spend (ROAS) when you value each conversion differently. |
Target ROAS automatically sets bids to help get as much conversion value as possible at the target return on ad spend (ROAS) you set. Some conversions may have a higher or lower return than your target. Learn more About Target ROAS bidding. |
| Increase visibility. |
Target impression share automatically sets bids with the goal of showing your ad on the absolute top of the page, on the top of the page, or anywhere on the page of search results. Learn more About Target impression share bidding. |
|
Increase clicks with spending your budget. |
Budget bid strategy: Maximize clicks automatically sets your bids and budget to help get as many clicks as possible within your target spend. Learn more About budget bid strategies. |
|
Get more conversions while spending your budget. |
Budget bid strategy: Maximize conversions automatically sets bids and budget to help you get the most conversions for your campaign within your target budget. Learn more About budget bid strategies. |
| Get more conversion value while spending your budget. |
Budget bid strategy: Maximize conversion value automatically sets bids and budgets to help you get the most conversion value for your campaign within your target budget. Learn more About budget bid strategies. |
| Get the most conversion value by grouping your bid strategies while maintaining individual targets. |
Multiple Target ROAS bidding automatically sets bids at or below your target CPA across the group using machine learning optimization to maximize potential conversions. Learn more About Multiple Target ROAS bidding. |
| Maximize conversions by grouping your bid strategies while maintaining individual targets. |
Multiple Target CPA bidding automatically sets bids at or below your target CPA across the group using machine learning optimization to get the most conversion value. Learn more About Multiple Target CPA bidding. |
Conversion data best practices
For your bid strategy to perform optimally, you need to ensure that you have sufficient and consistent conversion data.
Minimum conversion volumes
The minimum data requirements depend on the bidding system used:
- Google Ads Auction-Time Bidding (ATB): There’s no minimum required conversion volume.
- Intraday Bidding (for ROI portfolios): We recommend the portfolio have at least 20 conversions per week.
- ROAS Bidding: For the best results in ROAS bidding for both Google ATB and Intraday bid strategies, it’s recommended to have at least over 4 weeks of Conversion Value data, and longer if conversion volumes are low.
- Maximize clicks and target Impression Share: These portfolios don’t have any minimum data requirements.
- Frequency: Ensure that conversions being optimized towards are available on a frequent basis, ideally daily.
While some systems, like Google Ads Auction-Time Bidding (ATB) have no minimum required conversion volume requirement, generally, more conversions provide better performance.
- Better optimization: You get better and more stable performance with a higher volume of conversions. A high volume provides the bidding system with more data points. This helps identify trends, predict user behavior, and optimize bids effectively.
- Reduced fluctuations: Bid strategies operating with very low conversion volume may experience more performance fluctuations. The system may also find it harder to optimize them toward a precise goal.
Understand conversion delay
Conversion delay is the time lag between a user's click and their completion of a conversion action.
Impact on Bidding Strategy
The duration of this delay significantly affects how quickly your automated bid strategy can learn and adjust:
- Longer delay, slower learning: When a conversion action has a longer delay, like a "Purchase" conversion, which is common for lower-funnel goals, the bidding strategy will take longer to gather enough performance data and optimize bids effectively.
- Stabilization time: After implementing significant changes to a campaign or strategy, it will typically can take 2-3 full conversion-delay cycles for performance to fully stabilize.
Impact on performance evaluation
As a result, evaluating performance also takes more time:
- Data maturity: When reviewing results, you must exclude the most recent conversion-delay period as the performance data may not yet be reliable. Waiting for data to mature is crucial to making accurate evaluations.
- Strategic choice: The length of conversion delay should be a key consideration when selecting a conversion action. It affects the trade-off between high-volume, low-delay goals and low-volume, high-delay goals. This directly impacts the speed at which your bidding strategy can learn and adjust.
Get Started with bid strategies
Learn how to Create a Search Ads 360 portfolio bid strategy.