Effective from the week of 24 March 2025, enhanced CPC (ECPC) is no longer available for Search and Display campaigns. Campaigns that were not proactively migrated to another bid strategy prior to deprecation are now effectively using manual CPC. Note that ECPC will reflect in the user interface until May while we complete the update.
Keep the following in mind:
- While transitioning to a new bid strategy, it’s important to closely monitor performance and minimise fluctuations as bidding gradually adjusts to your new strategy.
- Manage spend and performance by adjusting budgets and targets as needed.
Consider the following bidding strategies and goals:
- Maximise conversions or target CPA: If your goal is to get as many conversions as possible within your budget and target CPA constraints (if applicable). More details here
- Maximise conversions value or target ROAS: If your goal is to maximise the return on the ad spend you set within your budget and target ROAS constraints (if applicable). Before switching goals, ensure that you have sufficient conversions with value enabled (2 or more differentiated values). More details here and on the value-based bidding hub
- Maximise clicks or target impressions/cost-per-thousand impressions (CPM): if your primary goal is to increase site visits or impressions.
- Pay-per-conversion (Display only): If eligible, you can use Pay for conversions to increase conversion volume while only paying for those conversions. Find more details on eligibility here.
Smart Bidding is a set of automated bidding strategies that use Google AI to optimise 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, Maximise conversions and Maximise 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.
Benefits of Smart Bidding
Google Ads automated bidding helps you optimise 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 optimisation: Smart Bidding optimises 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 modelling: 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.
Basics | Get started with Smart BiddingLearn the Smart Bidding basics and how to use it to achieve your business goals. |
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Set-up | Set-up Smart Bidding |
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View | View your Smart Bidding performanceUnderstand how your Smart Bidding strategies are performing. |
