Enhanced Campaigns: “Flexible Bid Strategies” Launching Soon

Google will be rolling out “flexible bid strategies” in enhanced campaigns in the next couple of weeks. Flexible bid strategies will allow advertisers to override automated bidding and apply manual bidding strategies within a single campaign or across multiple campaigns.

The new Bid strategies tool will be located in Shared Library. You can create a flexible bid strategy and then apply it to specific keywords, ad groups, and campaigns. Performance metrics by bidding strategy will be available in Bidding strategies.

There will be four types of flexible bid strategies available when the tool launches.  “Target search page location” is the only new bid strategy. It can be used to try to maintain top ad positions or at least first page positions.

Target CPA and Enhanced CPC strategies incorporate real-time bid data on “context signals ” like device  and location during each auction, and Google says it will be incorporated into other bid strategies in the future. Multiple bid strategies can be applied within the same campaign.

A couple of notes from the support documentation that could impact how and when you apply these strategies:

1. AdWords Editor users, you won’t be able to manage keywords, ad groups or campaigns to which you apply a bid strategy in Editor.
2. You can’t apply flexible bid strategies while running  a campaign experiment.

Look for Bid strategies to appear in early June.