In online advertising, everything is constantly changing with new tools, interfaces and functions. Automated or smart bid strategies from Google Ads are a great way for online marketers to save time while creating online campaigns.

No one doubts today that these Google Ads Smart bidding strategies are profoundly changing the historical practices of Google Ads campaign management: manual bidding management vs. automated bidding strategies. Manual modification of account optimization has multitude of parameters on which you can adjust the bids criteria such as delivery schedule, keyword matching types (broad, phrase or exact keywords), device (computer, mobile, tablet) audience, gender vs. automatic adjustments, dynamic campaigns or ad groups. And there’s still a whole bunch of parameters (millions of variables) that you can’t influence but Google takes into account when it comes to bid management.

Thanks to machine learning (artificial intelligence), it optimizes the bidding to get the highest number of conversions or the best conversions. There are a variety of automated bidding options in Google Ads including, Target CPA, Target ROAS, Maximize conversions, Maximize conversion value, and Enhanced CPC (ECPC). One of these strategies can be the best for your account, but others might not work. If you understand how each bidding strategy works, you can make automated bidding tools work great for you.

Here are 3 steps to make smart bidding strategies from Google Ads work better for you.

Step 1: Picking the right bid strategy

After setting up conversion tracking, based on your advertising goal, you can choose the right bidding strategy that can works best for you. Is it increasing conversions, decreasing cost per acquisition (CPA), meet a target return on ad spend (ROAS), or something else? Once you define your goal, pick the right bidding strategy to reach your business objectives.

If you are looking to increase your visibility, Target Impression Share automatically sets bids with the goal of showing your ad on the absolute top of the page, on the top of the page, or anywhere on the page of Google search results. Whereas, Maximize Conversions strategy helps you get as many conversions as possible within a certain budget.

In addition, Target ROAS could be the right approach if you have a campaign that’s already driven a certain number of conversions, and you want a specific ROAS. Target CPA in the other hand helps get as many conversions as possible at the target cost-per-action (CPA) you set.

Therefore, choose and pick carefully the strategy that could help you hit your goals and objectives.

Step 2: Patience

Once you choose and apply the right strategy to your campaign, the next step is to monitor its performance by looking at the number of clicks you are receiving for the budget you set it at. But put in mind that clicks can certainly vary depending if there is a holiday, weekends, special occasion, or even if you make changes to your campaign…etc.

It is important that you give the strategy chosen enough time from a week to few weeks to attain enough data to assess and analyze its performance and its effectiveness. During this waiting period, make sure you don’t make too many changes to your campaign.

After giving the strategy enough time, you can then learn and determine the standard lag time for conversions which is the time you need to wait before you do your analysis. In other words, it is how long it takes customers who see and click your ad to complete the conversion, as sometimes the conversion happens rapidly, and sometimes it takes more time. Conversions can be reported up to 90 days after the click, depending to the chosen conversion window.

Thus, patience is the key after implementing your smart bidding strategy.

Step 3: Optimization

While you are using automated bidding strategy, you can still work on your optimization. For instance, it is always a good idea to improve continuously your landing page interface or design, especially if you have an e-commerce site, so that your website visitors can have a good browsing experience. These type of optimizations can help your automated bidding strategy to perform even better.

Finally, by picking the right automated bid strategy, waiting enough time before evaluating its performance, and optimizing continuously. Your strategy can even work great and give better results.