After six months of automated bid adjustments to branded search advertising based on the bid strategy goals, campaigns became very cost-efficient, but missed out on top-converting search volume. Overall spend and tracked revenue declined, so our team sought out an opportunity to continue to use automation to make bid adjustments at granular levels, while increasing spend and tracked revenue.

While still in beta, we applied Budget Bid Strategies across all branded campaigns. This product uses allocated budget plans to determine key target metrics, such as return on investment, and target spend. These plans were determined by historical performance and in alignment with geo-location, search keyword content, and search engine. Each budget plan’s target spend was also based on potential reach. As the brand’s search landscape is very competitive, optional position constraints were applied to ensure the official site search ads served in top positions.

After Budget Bid Strategy beta implementation on August 21, 2018, campaigns took a few weeks to observe performance data and make adjustments. The Budget Bid Strategies’ target spend led to higher bids and cost-per-clicks when users were likely to convert. As budget prioritized users who were most likely to convert, campaigns saw an account-level high conversion rate. While branded search advertising spend remained consistent in Q3 and Q4 2018, revenue increased by 30%.