Google Ads portfolio bid strategy changes: Removing eCPC, average daily budget replacing target spend

In an effort to help simplify settings, Google said, it is making changes to two portfolio bid strategies. Portfolio bid strategies can be applied across multiple campaigns in a Google Ads account.

Average daily budget for maximize clicks. Starting in July, the target spend setting will no longer be an option when setting up new maximize clicks portfolio bid strategies. Instead, the strategy will use the average daily budgets of the campaigns in the portfolio. “Many of you have told us the target spend setting was confusing and that average daily budgets were more useful and straightforward. We’ve listened to your feedback,” Sagar Shah, a Google Ads product manager wrote in the blog post.

The maximize clicks strategy automatically adjusts bids to try to get as many clicks as possible within your budget — or target spend, if you’d set one. If you didn’t set a target spend, the system aimed to spend the remaining daily budget of any of the campaigns using the bid strategy.

Target spend is defined as: “the amount you’d like to spend each day on all campaigns that use this bid strategy. Unlike your budget, target spend isn’t a hard limit. Your daily spend may exceed your target spend at times.” You can see why setting a budget and spend target could cause confusion, not to mention the fact that average daily budgets exactly aren’t hard targets either. Your actual daily spend may exceed the daily budget you set (by as much as double — or more if you’re optimizing for conversions). Google will respect your monthly budget (daily budget x 30.4 days).

Legacy target spend settings will be removed automatically at some point “later this year,” and those portfolios will use your average daily budget to manage spend.

No more portfolio eCPC. Also in July, enhanced CPC will no longer be available as a portfolio bid strategy. There is no added benefit to using eCPC as a portfolio strategy as opposed to at the campaign level, and Google says they’re “far more widely used” on individual campaigns. If you have enhanced CPC portfolios, they’ll be converted automatically to the campaign level.

Why we should care. These changes follow the announcements that target search page location and target outranking share bid strategies are going away — at the campaign and portfolio levels — this month. Enhanced CPC will remain a campaign bid strategy, but at the portfolio level, there will be four strategies: target CPA, target ROAS, maximize clicks and target impression share.

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Ginny Marvin

Ginny Marvin is Third Door Media’s Editor-in-Chief, running the day to day editorial operations across all publications and overseeing paid media coverage. Ginny Marvin writes about paid digital advertising and analytics news and trends for Search Engine Land, Marketing Land and MarTech Today. With more than 15 years of marketing experience, Ginny has held both in-house and agency management positions. She can be found on Twitter as @ginnymarvin.