Google Ads Smart Bidding is like self-driving cars: great in theory but we probably shouldn’t take a nap behind the wheel.
Smart Bidding is Google Ads’ promise of hands-free campaign management. I’ve often written of its dangers, where the mighty algorithm swoops in to deliver fabulous results which really aren’t what we intended. One analogy is that it’s like self-driving cars: great in theory but we probably shouldn’t take a nap behind the wheel just yet.
The major catch is that the algorithm needs data — and lots of it. Throw Smart Bidding into a campaign with only few conversions and it’ll be guessing like crazy. I accidentally did this myself last month on a friend’s account and the results were rubbish.
That’s why I’d always suggest starting – possibly for several weeks – with manual bidding or the ‘Maximize Clicks’ setting. Then we need to ensure our eventual bid strategy matches our actual goal — conversions, not confusion. For example, mixing leads with purchases might send us down a very wrong path.
Finally, Smart Bidding may be smart, but it’s not psychic. If we set-and-forget, we should expect as many mysterious dips in performance as we’d get with an unattended manually-controlled campaign. It’s just as important when leaving things to the machine to keep a close eye on metrics like CPA, ROAS, and search term reports. Conversion tracking can easily feed it bad data, and garbage in means garbage out.