Google Marketing Platform

What’s new with automated bidding in Display & Video 360

Woman with blue hair automates bids for auctions for ads.

Automated bidding in Display & Video 360 helps advertisers improve performance by adjusting bids in real time to achieve the results they care about. Using Google’s advanced machine learning, it evaluates and tailors your bids for every auction to help predict the likelihood of a conversion.

Today we’re introducing improvements to the automated bidding solutions in Display & Video 360. First, we’re introducing a new interface where you can set Custom Bidding multipliers without writing any code. Second, we’re adding support for pay for viewable impressions to outcome based buying. Lastly, we’re introducing a new report to give you more insights into how automated bidding places bids to hit your goals.

Simplified setup for Custom Bidding

Custom Bidding is an automated bidding strategy that allows you to assign values to different events, such as a conversion or a purchase. Marketers told us that Custom Bidding delivers great results because it helps tailor their bidding to their unique goals, but we also learned that they can’t always use it because they might lack the technical resources to build the required scripts. In addition to uploading a custom script, you now have the option to select Floodlight activities and assign them the value you want in an easy-to-use interface. For example, you can assign a higher value to high-value purchases, so that your ads are tuned to specifically increase revenue instead of driving more transactions. In the future, you will also be able to use Analytics 360 goals in the same way.

User interface for Display & Video 360 features Floodlight activity and Custom Bidding

Choose goal builder to assign values to different Floodlight activities and use them for Custom Bidding.

Outcome based buying for branding campaigns

Up until now, outcome based buying only supported performance campaigns by allowing marketers to pay per click for campaigns that use target cost per acquisition (CPA) or maximize conversions strategies. To make better use of your branding budgets, we’ve introduced pay per viewable impressions (as measured by Active View) for your display and video campaigns. This allows you to optimize for maximize active view. So you’ll reduce budget waste and achieve better performance by only paying for impressions that are viewable instead of each impression.

Learn how automated bidding works for your campaigns

We’ve heard that you’d like to learn more about how the automated bidding algorithm places your bids. We’re introducing a new report, Bidding Insights, that will give you more visibility into how automated bidding is working. First, you will be able to monitor what the average cost-per-thousand impression (CPM) bid is based on the likelihood of an impression to lead to a conversion or a click. This way you’ll see that automated bidding is increasing your bids for impressions that generate better returns for you.

In addition, Bidding Insights will show you how many impressions you won based on their likelihood to lead to the outcome you selected for automated bidding. Bidding insights will become available after seven days of activity and after there is sufficient data to provide meaningful insights in all campaigns that are using automated bidding.

User Interface image of Access Bidding insights

Access Bidding insights at the IO level where the bidding strategy is displayed

These new bidding features allow you to quickly adapt to consumer behavior by giving you more flexibility and customization for your bidding strategies across both brand and performance campaigns.

This post closes our Display & Video 360 product announcements series covering new features to support your business recovery and growth. Stay tuned for additional updates on Campaign Manager 360 soon.