Google recently announced at Google Marketing Live 2019 some changes to bidding and conversion controls for Google Ads. Many advertisers will welcome these changes as they provide a bit more flexibility and user control. The four main changes are briefly discussed below.
One of these changes just went live across all accounts. On June 6th, Google announced that all accounts now have the ability to set conversions at the campaign-level.
Campaign Level Conversions Settings
Previously, the ability to adjust conversions was limited to account level changes. If you wanted to exclude or include a particular conversion, it was done at the account level. That change happened for ALL campaigns in the account. Now, this control can be done at the campaign level.
As of June 6th, advertisers can now choose which conversions to include in the ‘Conversions’ column at the campaign level. This will allow you to analyze performance and optimize campaigns based on the most relevant conversion action types.
This new feature will come in handy for those accounts that have campaigns with different conversion types or goals.
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Maximizing Conversion Value
This is a great new bidding feature that was only a matter of time. Currently, Google Ads offers a Maximize Conversions bidding option. This can help businesses who are looking for an increase in leads or sales. However, this bidding option only focuses on efficiency. For eCommerce advertisers, this can be an issue as Maximize Conversion bidding does not factor in value (sales revenue).
With this new value-focused bidding strategy, ecommerce advertisers have a new bidding tool that focuses on what is most important; sales revenue. If you are currently running Google Ads for your eCommerce business, you may want to test this out. For some of our clients who do not necessarily have a specific ROI (or ROAS target), we have tested this bidding option out. So far, the initial results are positive.
If you do have a specific ROAS target, then you may want to look into ROAS target bidding.
Seasonality Adjustments
PPC performance can drastically change during holiday shopping season and short-term periods of time when sales tend to spike. Although Google’s current Smart Bidding options do factor in seasonality, the demand for more flexibility has been strong among advertisers. Google has finally providing more controls over these periods of time with the introduction of seasonality adjustments. With these new bidding controls, you can schedule bid adjustment for a specific period of time. For example, if you expect sales to increase during your peak season or during a specific promotion, you can increase bids to take advantage of this spike.
Value Rules
This is an interesting new feature that some advertisers might find some value in (pun intented). For those businesses who don’t apply the same value to all conversions, these new value rules may come in handy. These rules will allow you to make distinctions between values for different characteristics like audiences, location and device.
Google has stated they will be rolling this feature out in the coming months.