Best practices for bidding strategies

Bidding Strategy

Use Cases

Things to Remember

Best Practice

Cost Cap

Looking for goal based bidding.

Looking to keep costs around a specified goal regardless of market conditions.

Recommended strategy for Branding objectives (Reach and Video Views).

Requires pixel or good tracking in place to calculate Cost per result accurately.

When using Reach and Video View Objectives:

Use the suggested bid and reach estimator to guide your bid cap when using the Reach and Video objectives

Campaign and Ad Group set up:

At the Campaign level set the Budget to no limit.

At the Ad Group set the budget to at least 10 times the bid amount as the lowest budget.

Set the highest cost per action (CPA) bid that you can accept for Cost Cap or a lowest return on advertising spend (ROAS) bid for a minimum ROAS. These bids are helpful for the ad groups to pass the Learning Phase and scale.

Increasing bid for Cost Cap or decreasing bid for minimum ROAS is the most direct and effective way to improve low delivery and scaling issues.

Maximum Delivery

Looking for spend based bidding instead of setting a specified bid.

Used when you want to ensure that you drive the most results for a given budget over a specific time period.

You will see more volatility in your cost per results during periods of high competition.

Cost per Results may fluctuate day to day based on the changes in the auction environment.

You will always obtain the most results at the Maximum Delivery for that time period.

Campaign and Ad Group set up:

At the Campaign level set the Budget to no limit.

At the Ad Group set a daily budget that can cover at least 50 conversions based on your account's historical cost per result.

To pass the learning phase, you should set up a daily budget 50 times your aimed CPA. We recommend 5 times the bid as the lowest budget.

Post-Learning Phase for conversion events only.

Only increase the ad group budget by a maximum of 50% at a time, as increasing the budget will often result in a higher cost per result. The system will find the Maximum Delivery per result first and then increase the bid amount to achieve the most results that the budget can support.

When you increase budget, if you are concerned that the cost per result may get too high, we recommend you use hybrid bidding to switch maximum delivery to cost cap and set a bid that you can accept while increasing budget.