Set up Smart Bidding for a display campaign

Before you use a Smart Bidding strategy, you’ll want to determine your overall goal. The goal that you choose determines the Smart Bidding strategy for your display campaign.

Step 1: Choose the best Smart Bidding strategy

Use the flowchart to help you find a Smart Bidding strategy that's best for your business.

To choose the optimal Smart Bidding strategy for a Display campaign, follow these steps:

1. Are you tracking conversions?
   • If yes, proceed to step 2.
   • If no, use Enhanced Cost-Per-Click (ECPC).
2. Do you use third-party bidding tools?
   • If yes, use ECPC.
   • If no, proceed to step 3.
3. Do you want to spend your budget or achieve Return On Investment (ROI)?
   • If the objective is to prioritise budget spend, use Maximise Conversion.
   • If you want to prioritise ROI, proceed to step 4.
4. Do you expect more than 30 conversion events per month?
   • If yes, proceed to step 5.
   • If no, use Maximise Conversion.
5. Do you have a Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) or Return On Ad Spend (ROAS) Goal?
   • If yes, proceed to step 6.
   • If no, use Maximise Conversion.
6. Do you pass value conversion values in addition to conversion?
   • If yes, use Target ROAS. If you want view-through and click-through conversions, proceed to step 7.
   • If no, use Target CPA and (if eligible) pay for conversions.
7. Do you want view-through and click-through conversions?
   • If yes, use Target ROAS.
   • If no, use Target CPA and (if eligible) pay for conversions.

Step 2: Ensure that conversion tracking is set up properly

Smart Bidding relies on conversion tracking data as it learns and optimises your campaigns. Smart Bidding can bid towards conversions from Google Ads, Google Analytics (if you import conversions into Google Ads) and offline conversion imports.

If the conversion tracking data are inaccurate, you may see fluctuations in your volume, CPA or ROAS. Smart Bidding can react and adjust to inaccurate conversion tracking data.

If you use third-party conversion tracking tools, make sure that you compare the conversion volume in those tools with your conversion volume in Google Ads reporting. Note any differences before calculating your Target CPA or Target ROAS.

Step 3: Set your bidding targets

Start with Maximise conversions, Target CPA or ECPC immediately so that our programmatic bidding algorithm can bid based on conversion likelihood from the start.

If you want to use target ROAS bidding, start with Maximise conversions or target CPA and then switch to target ROAS bidding when you have enough conversions. You typically need at least 15 conversions in a 30 day period, but some advertisers with relevant historical data may be eligible sooner.

Step 4: Optimise your campaign settings

Budget

Smart Bidding performs best with a budget not limited by spend. Budget constraints can affect performance, as the campaign isn't able to participate in auctions that are most likely to drive a conversion. Consider using Maximise conversions if you’re budget-constrained.

Frequency caps

Remove any frequency caps, as they can prevent your campaigns from appearing in auctions with a high likelihood of converting. Smart Bidding determines the campaign’s likelihood of getting conversions, which makes it unnecessary to set a frequency cap.

Bidding strategy

Depending on your bidding strategy, you can choose to pay for clicks, pay for conversions or pay for viewable impressions. If you’re using target CPA, choose to pay for conversions to reduce any fluctuations in target CPA.

Bid adjustments

You should avoid bid adjustments, as Smart Bidding strategies set bids to optimise for your conversion goals. Instead, make sure to optimise for a relevant conversion event (with an optimal conversion value) and follow the bidding and budget best practices mentioned in this guide.

Step 5: Segment your ad groups

Only segment your ad groups when necessary. Smart Bidding performs best when allowed to evaluate performance and optimise bids across as much traffic as possible. Segmenting many ad groups is discouraged unless there's a compelling business reason to do so.

Here are the situations where you should segment your ad groups:

• Assign different conversion values to user attributes: If you report conversion value and use target ROAS, Smart Bidding optimises to deliver higher-value conversions in line with your ROAS goal. If you don't report conversion value but you know some conversions are more valuable than others, then you should use target CPA and segment the ad groups.
• Show different creatives: For instance, show a brand-focused creative to an upper-funnel user and a direct response creative to a lower-funnel user.
• Identify specific insights the algorithm won’t know: For instance, if you know time-to-departure is an important statistic, use this metric to segment ad groups. Create one ad group targeting only users whose departures are about to happen and another for users with trips farther in the future and tailor creative messaging accordingly. Another common use case is segmenting for offline metrics or customer lifetime value.
• Get additional insight or reporting: You should create a new ad group when you want to split reporting between targeting or creative groupings. When you have 2 separate ad groups, you’ll receive statistics for each ad group on a separate line item in the 'Ad groups' report.
• Value new users and existing users differently: Many advertisers set a higher CPA and lower ROAS target for new users.
• Check attribution discrepancies for different segments based on third-party reporting: For instance, if Google Ads reports 50% more conversions than a third-party reporting tool for your keyword-targeted campaign, but only 20% more conversions for in-market segments, you should segment to account for this discrepancy.

Even if you segment ad groups, evaluate performance towards your goal at the campaign-level or account-level rather than focusing on ad group fluctuations. Remember to consider conversion delays when evaluating performance.