Run Bid Experiments in Ads Optimizer

Overview

Experiments can be enabled optionally on a per-campaign basis. It makes changes to your existing Ad campaign bid strategy in Google Ads. Use Optimizer's experimentation feature if you don't have the means to run experiments in Google Ads.

Things to know

If you're using a marketing agency that does this manually, Optimizer will overwrite their work. We recommend coordinating with all parties involved in managing your Ad campaigns before enabling Optimizer Experiments.

How Optimizer Experiments work

The primary benefit of Ads Optimizer is that it imports revenue back into Google Ads. This feeds the most valuable data about your business to Google so it can optimize your campaigns and improve ROI. However, Google doesn't do this by default; it needs to be configured to start prioritizing Revenue over Leads.

Configure Google Ads by adjusting your Bid Strategies in Google. After Ads Optimizer starts importing revenue back into Google Ads, two new bid strategies are unlocked: Maximize Conversion Value and Target ROAS. Choosing one of these as a bid strategy tells Google to go for clicks that are likely to lead to high-paying customers, instead of clicks that just get the phone to ring.

There are nuances to making this kind of change. If done incorrectly, it can actually be counterproductive to campaign performance. That's why we built Ads Optimizer to handle the management of Bid Strategies for you.

Optimize an ad campaign's bid strategy

1. Go to the navigation bar and click Marketing .

2. From the side menu, click Ads Optimizer under Campaigns.

3. On the Ads Optimizer screen, click the Settings tab.

4. In the Value Based Experiment column, click Run Experiment for the campaign you want to run the experiment for. 

5. In the Run Experiment Confirmation pop-up that opens, click Yes, Confirm to confirm that you want to enable the bid strategy for the Ads campaign.         

   Note: You can optimize bid strategy for individual Ad campaigns only. Optimizer Experiments will not work if you are using a Shared Budget across multiple campaigns.

This begins analyzing that campaign continuously to see how many transactions ServiceTitan has sent to it. This is because Google recommends waiting until there are enough revenue conversions for a campaign for its Smart Bidding to work properly.

When there are a total of 30 transactions for a single campaign, Optimizer proceeds with trying out a revenue-focused bid strategy. Initially, it experiments with the Maximize Conversion Value bid strategy since it typically outperforms Target Target Return on Ad Spend (ROAS).

When you click Run Experiment for a campaign, the following happens in Google Ads:

• A new campaign is created that is a clone of the original.

• 20% of the campaign's traffic is targeted with the Maximize Conversion Value strategy.

• 80% of the campaign's traffic is targeted with whatever strategy is already in place.

• The campaign runs until one strategy is clearly outperforming the other. This means there's a statistical significance proving that one will continue to outperform the other.

When a winner is determined, Optimizer then runs a new experiment with the same conditions. Only the 20% segment uses the bid strategy of Target ROAS. When that experiment concludes, Optimizer considers your campaign's bid strategy optimized and finalizes the experiments.

Note: The Target ROAS bid strategy asks you to specify a target ROAS amount. Ads Optimizer automatically sets this amount when creating the experiment. Google returns a recommendation and Ads Optimizer uses what they recommend. If there is no recommendation, Ads Optimizer uses a default of 400% (4x ROI).

Want to learn more?

• See Get started with Marketing Pro Ads

• See Marketing Analytics

• See Google Ads Integration