Auction-time bidding is a Google Ads Smart Bidding feature that analyzes several contextual signals at the time of the auction to set bids with the goal of targeting your ads. Learn more about About Smart Bidding in the Google Ads Help Center.
This article explains the setup process and the requirements when combining Search Ads 360 bid strategies with Google Ads auction-time bidding.
On this page
- Benefits
- How they work together
- Compatible Search Ads 360 strategies
- Key requirements
- How to enable bid strategies and budget bid strategies to use conversion data
- Thing to keep in mind
Benefits
By enabling the integration of SA360 bid strategy and Google Ads auction-time bidding, your campaigns receive:
- Smarter bid optimization: Combine Search Ads 360's advanced portfolio strategies with Google Ads' real-time auction signals for optimal, granular adjustments that align with your overall business objectives.
- Drive better performance: Make more informed and faster bidding decisions at every auction to help maximize your return on investment and conversion volume.
- Real-time adaptability: Bids adapt instantly to changes in user behavior and auction dynamics. It helps ensure bids are optimized.
How they work together
When you use Search Ads 360 bid strategies or budget bid strategies with Google Ads auction-time bidding, you combine the best of Search Ads 360’s portfolio building capabilities with the real-time bidding power of Google Ads Smart Bidding. This includes the ability to manage portfolios across channels and engines.
Search Ads 360 bid strategies analyze campaign performance to set high-level goals like return on investment targets or budgets. For example, the strategy may set different targets by campaign, campaign type or engine to maximize the overall portfolio performance, meaning some individual campaigns may receive a higher and some a lower ROI target to ensure the collective goal is achieved.
Google Ads auction-time bidding then executes these targets by analyzing various contextual signals (such as device, browser type, location, time of day, and audience) in real time to set individual bids at the moment of each auction. This ensures your ads are displayed in the best position to maximize performance.
If Google Ads auction-time bidding is enabled, your Search Ads 360 strategy uses the performance outcome of those auction-time bids in its analysis to continuously adjust campaign targets and helps you achieve your overall objectives.
Compatible Search Ads 360 strategies
You can enable Google Ads auction-time bidding in the following Search Ads 360 bid strategies and budget bid strategies:
- Search Ads 360 bid strategies
- Search Ads 360 budget bid strategies
- Maximize conversions
- Maximize conversion value
Google Ads auction time biddable is available for all supported Google Ads campaign types.
Whilst Google Ads auction time bidding will only apply to the Google Ads campaigns within a compatible bid strategy, you can also include campaigns from other supported advertiser platforms, such as Microsoft Advertising, Yahoo! JAPAN, and Baidu into a single Search Ads 360 portfolio bid strategy to enable cross-engine optimization.
Combined bid strategies will use a mixture of Google Ads auction time bidding, Microsoft Advertising auction time bidding, and Intraday bidding, depending on the campaigns and settings selected. We recommend Google Ads auction-time bidding and Microsoft auction-time bidding to be enabled for combined campaigns.
Key requirements
To successfully use a Search Ads 360 bid strategy with Google Ads auction-time bidding, the following requirements are important:
- You must enable Search Ads 360 conversion data sharing with Google Ads at the sub-manager level. To ensure both bidding systems optimize based on the same performance data, Search Ads 360 conversion data must be shared (with your consent) with Google Ads. This is essential for auction-time bidding functionality.
- Conversions must be biddable. You’re required to select one or more conversion goals (for example, you may include your website conversion actions) in your campaign’s conversion goal settings, where the desired conversion actions must be set to either "Primary" optimization or explicitly included in the selected campaign-level goal. This action, along with your bidding settings, enables an SA360 bid strategy with Google Ads auction-time bidding to use these conversions for optimization.
How to enable bid strategies and budget bid strategies to use conversion data
To enable Search Ads 360 bid strategies to use conversion data for optimization with Google Ads auction-time bidding, follow these steps:
- Add a conversion action to a standard conversion goal as a primary action. Primary conversions are reported in the “Conversions” column to optionally use them for optimization. Learn more About primary and secondary conversions.
- You can also add a primary or secondary conversion action to a custom goal if you want an automated strategy to use the conversion data for optimization.
- Enable conversion-data sharing. This is required for functionalities like Google Ads auction-time bidding.
- Select the “Google Ads auction-time bidding” option in your bid strategy or in a budget bid strategy in a plan.
- Add the Google Ads campaign to a bid strategy or campaign group. Select one of the following methods:
- Select one or more conversion goals in your campaign’s settings. You can use the account-default goal, campaign-specific goals, or a combination.
Learn how to Share Search Ads 360 conversions with Google Ads.
Things to keep in mind
When using Search Ads 360 bid strategies with Google Ads auction-time bidding, it's important to understand the scope and limitations of this combination. The automated, real-time nature of auction-time bidding introduces specific rules for where bids are applied, how overrides are handled, and what types of manual adjustments are still permitted. Keep the following notes in mind to ensure your bid strategy performs as expected.
- Scope of bidding and performance: Auction-time bidding only applies to the Google Ads campaigns within the bid strategy. If your bid strategy includes campaigns from other supported advertising platforms, the auction-time bidding will only affect your Google Ads campaigns. However, the bid strategy will continue to use the performance history from all campaigns in the strategy to set bids.
- Bid overrides: SA360 supports any auction-time bid overrides that are allowed by the advertising platform.
- Manual overrides are not supported: Auction-time bids and bid adjustments can't be manually overwritten in Search Ads 360 or in Google Ads. You might be able to enter a bid or bid adjustment in the user interface, but this setting is ignored.
- Allowed Adjustments: Google Ads does allow you to change the value of your CPA target for devices and exclude devices in target ROAS bid strategies. Learn more about the bid adjustments that Google Ads allows with automated bidding in the Google Ads Help Center.