Search Ads 360 rolls out auction-time bidding for Google Search campaigns

Google Search Ads 360, the enterprise-level search management piec of Google Marketing Platform that enables advertisers and agencies to manage campaigns across multiple search engines, has added auction-bidding for bids on Google Search.

Why we should care

For Search Ads 360 users, this brings the Smart Bidding capabilities offered in Google Ads to your Google Search campaigns. Smart bidding uses machine learning to make real-time bids based on a number of signals such as device, location and time of day.

Auction-time bidding analyzes your account history, conversions registered by Floodlight, Google Marketing Platform’s conversion tracking system, and other signals to predict when a conversion is likely to occur from an ad click. In contrast, a Search Ads 360 bid strategy analyzes campaign performance approximately every 6 hours to set keyword bids and set or recommend bid adjustments.

“By activating auction-time bidding you can enhance your performance when bidding on Google Search, while still maintaining your cross-channel bidding strategy powered by Search Ads 360,” explained Jason Krueger, a Search Ads 360 product manager, in the announcement.

More on the news

• Auction-time bidding is generally available for Google Search campaigns and in open beta for Google Shopping campaigns.
• Because auction-time bidding is machine learning-driven and requires data to train, Google says its Smart Bidding system will learn for at least a week before it begins setting auction-time bids.
• Google says hundreds of advertisers participated in the beta and saw, on average, a conversion lift of 15 to 30% at the same or better ROI.
• Click on an existing bid strategy to enable auction-time bidding in your Google Search campaigns as shown in the screenshot below. When you opt in, you consent to share the bid strategy’s Floodlight conversions with Google Ads to enable both bidding systems to use the same conversion data. For more details, see the help page.

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About The Author

Ginny Marvin

Ginny Marvin was Third Door Media’s former Editor-in-Chief (October 2018 to December 2020), running the day-to-day editorial operations across all publications and overseeing paid media coverage. Ginny Marvin wrote 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.