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Smart Bidding

Smart Bidding is Google’s auction-time automated bidding, which sets a distinct bid for every auction using contextual signals unavailable to manual bidders. Main strategies: Target ROAS, Target CPA, Maximize Conversions, Maximize Conversion Value.

— In practice

Smart Bidding optimizes exactly what you feed it. Given revenue, it chases revenue — including low-margin revenue. Given leads, it chases leads — including junk leads. The operator’s job has shifted from setting bids to governing the conversion data and targets the system optimizes toward.

The practical disciplines: give it clean, deduplicated conversions with values that reflect economics; change targets gradually (10-20% steps) to avoid re-entering learning; and judge results over conversion-cycle windows, not day-to-day.

— What we learn

Knowing what Smart Bidding means isn’t the edge.

Knowing what it’s doing to live accounts right now is. Operator notes from $200M+ in managed spend — sent when we find something worth your time.

Want to know what yours is?

The free audit reads your actual account and computes the numbers behind every one of these definitions — no generic benchmarks.

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