What Happens When We All Use Google Automated Bidding?

I still remember the days when clever account managers could differentiate themselves by the unique and innovative manual bid strategies they used. Those days are largely gone, with the vast majority of Google accounts we see being run on some form of automated bidding now.

This does pose a couple of questions though.

What happens when we all use Google automated bid strategies – will this give Google the ability to drive up click costs into oblivion?
How will account managers find an advantage when all bids are automated?

Certainly great questions worthy of a conversation!

So Will Google Keep Bidding Into Oblivion?

In a word, no and there are two main reasons why this won’t happen:

#1 – CPC will go too high

If CPC’s go too high the campaign will overshoot its target, meaning the algorithm will wind down bids.

#2 – Too many other variables

Different accounts and managers will have different smart bidding settings that will drive different bids between similar advertisers.

For example:

Different CPA/ROAS targets between advertisers
Different smart bidding strategy chosen
Users location is closer to one advertiser than another
Attribution models are different between advertisers
Different keywords and match types between advertisers will trigger ads for different searchers
Landing page quality will be different and directly affect bids (via quality score)
Ad quality will also affect quality score and therefore bids
Available budget of a specific advertiser
Some advertisers will be feeding better data into the machine than others (for example, customer match audience or remarketing audiences added as an observation audience
could improve smart bidding results)
Advertisers who use micro-conversions will generally get better results than those who are using minimal (final) conversion events.
Use of a variety of extensions

How Can You Retain A Point Of Difference?

We have three suggestions that might help

Focus on improving ad rank by testing ad messaging and landing pages. Make sure you’re using both expanded text ads and responsive search ads, and creating messaging that allows you to stand out from your competition

Improve and optimize your product feed to Google best practice, ensuring that titles, descriptions, and other attributes are as descriptive as possible

Feed better data into the machine than your competitors do. Use audiences, conversions, and business data options to give the optimization algorithms as much information about your business as possible.

Wrap up

If you have any questions about Automated Bidding, please feel free to hit us up on our Facebook Page or email us directly