The Pros & Cons of Every Automated Bidding Strategy in Google Ads

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Google Ads has been proven to be effective in helping businesses and organizations improve their brand’s online presence. This type of digital marketing strategy and online advertising program allows businesses of any size to advertise their brand to a targeted audience and reach millions of users who are searching for products and services similar to what they offer.

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Not too Long ago, digital marketers and businesses have to place ad bids and monitor campaigns manually. Both of these activities can be quite daunting and time-consuming. Monitoring just a single campaign can be draining and can leave you feeling pressed for time. How much more exhausting can it be if you are managing multiple campaigns at a time? Thankfully, Google Ads came in with an effective solution for this dilemma. And that’s through automated bidding.

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Top 3 Most Commonly Used Automated Bidding Strategies in Google Ads

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There are different types of automated bidding strategies in Google Ads or PPC Marketing used today. Each of these strategies differs from each other in terms of uses, goals, pros, and cons. Among the most commonly used automated bidding strategies in Google Ads today are:

Maximize Clicks

This automated bidding strategy aims to increase site visits by getting as many clicks as possible. The Maximize Clicks strategy is best used if you want to drive more volume to your site for list building and/or branding. It is also perfect for those businesses with a very strong conversion performance but still wants to add more volume.

 Maximize Clicks Pros:
Maximize Clicks is available for a single campaign as a standard strategy and across multiple campaigns, ad groups, and keywords as a portfolio bid strategy.
With this strategy, Google automatically sets bids, maximizing clicks while staying within your daily budget.

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 Maximize Clicks Cons:
Google will work hard to get as many clicks even if they are far more expensive than normal. To ensure that your CPCs are kept at a minimum while Google spends the daily budget, you may need to set a max CPC limit.
Maximize Clicks is optimized towards users who are likely to click an ad. And because bids are directed towards getting as many clicks and traffic through the site as possible, conversion performance and the quality of clicks may be sacrificed.

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Target Return On Ad Spend

The Target Return On Ad Spend or Target ROAS is an automated bidding strategy that aims to help you receive as much conversion value as possible while trying to achieve the set ROAS goal at the ad group, campaign, or portfolio level. With this strategy, Google Ads adjust bids in real-time and place bids automatically to maximize conversion value.

 Target ROAS Pros:
It is a smart and creative solution that helps algorithms analyze millions of signals in real-time and optimize bidding or ads automatically.
It is best for businesses that want to focus their marketing efforts on driving the highest value of conversions rather than on trying to receive the highest number of conversions.

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 Target ROAS Cons:
This strategy will require you to have accurate conversion tracking in place.
In order to set an effective ad bid, to predict future bids, and to optimize your performance goals, Google will need your historical data. If you have just started with Google Ads and you still don’t have historical online conversion metrics or enough recent conversion performance, this automated bidding strategy may not work for you.

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Maximize Conversion

Maximize Conversion is a fully machine learning-driven, fully automated Google Ads bidding strategy that aims to receive as many conversions as possible while spending your budget. With this strategy, Google chooses a CPC bid according to the set goal outcome. This strategy is optimized for a higher volume of conversions.

 Maximize Conversion Pros:
This strategy saves you time. Since bids are set automatically, you will no longer have to spend as much time placing the ad bids as you do when doing the task manually. Google will automatically set bid amounts based on the probability that your ad campaign will result in conversion or click. This helps you save time especially when setting bids for multiple campaigns.
Maximize Conversion is best suited for those that want to automate ads to drive more conversions.

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 Maximize Conversion Cons:
Only available for individual campaigns as a standard strategy.
Lack of control. With an automated bidding strategy, Google automatically sets ad bidding based on the information reflected in the historical online conversion metrics and based on what is likely to convert. This gives you little control over each campaign. You may not be able to incorporate contextual or extraneous data into bid optimization. If you are working with an ad campaign with variable or flexible components, contextual data, or BI data like product inventory, this strategy might not work for you since Google only reacts to how efforts change conversion rates over time and not on the available information you have at hand.
It is best suited for companies with a flexible budget. While this can be an advantage to large corporations or companies with a flexible ad campaign budget, automated bidding might not be suited for those businesses with a fixed or tight budget. As earlier said, Google sets bids based on the historical online conversion metrics or the conversion data tracked by the Google pixel. With this, you can expect drastic changes from time to time especially in terms of the ad amount.

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Conclusion:

The above-mentioned automated bidding strategies are just the top three of the eight primary strategies used by advertisers when using Google Ads. The other five strategies are Target CPA, Target Search Page Location, Target Outranking Share, Enhanced CPC, and Target Impression Share.

There is so much you need to do and understand when managing campaigns. Aside from creating an attractive advertisement material, you also need to understand how to engage with your targeted audience in different stages of the “customer journey” or “searching/buying process” to improve the efficacy of your ad campaign. Doing all these and more manually can be really challenging. With automated bidding, however, Google Ads is made easier and faster.

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