Topic: smart bidding
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Black Friday's Broken Seasonality Adjustments
Google's Smart Bidding algorithms autonomously detect and respond to holiday conversion surges, making manual seasonality adjustments during Black Friday and Cyber Monday unnecessary and often counterproductive. Applying seasonality adjustments frequently leads to overbidding and inflated costs, ...
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Master Broad Match Without Losing Control
Google Ads is shifting toward automated campaign management, with broad match now a core component designed to work integrally with Smart Bidding and machine-driven intent matching, moving away from manual keyword lists. The primary risk of modern broad match is strategic drift toward low-quality...
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Fix Google AI Bidding When It Fails: Regain Control
Google's AI-powered bidding strategies, like Target ROAS, are designed to maximize Google's revenue by spending your full budget, which may conflict with specific business goals like profitability, cash flow, or inventory constraints. The algorithms lack awareness of critical business factors lik...
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Google's Performance Max Gets New Smart Bidding Exploration Tool
Google has introduced Smart Bidding Exploration for Performance Max campaigns, allowing more flexible return on ad spend targets to capture additional conversions. Early tests show an 18% increase in unique converting queries and a 19% rise in total conversions, though some experts caution it may...
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Optmyzr's 3-Year BFCM Study: Key Seasonality Adjustment Insights
A three-year study found that manual seasonality adjustments for Black Friday and Cyber Monday campaigns often reduce efficiency, as automated Smart Bidding systems already account for seasonal fluctuations without intervention. Using seasonality adjustments led to significantly higher cost-per-c...
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Google Adds Seasonal Bid Controls for App Campaigns
Google has launched a beta feature for App Campaigns that introduces seasonal bid controls to help advertisers manage campaigns during short, high-impact events like sales or product launches. This tool allows proactive bid increases to address predictable conversion rate swings, ensuring better ...
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Master Attribution Paths to Supercharge Your Google Ads
Attribution paths in Google Ads reveal the complete customer journey by showing how different touchpoints contribute to conversions, which is essential for aligning automation with business outcomes. These paths help demonstrate the impact of upper-funnel activities, validate budget reallocations...
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2025 Holiday PPC: Master Bidding, Budgets & Audiences
Start PPC campaigns early, as consumer research begins in October with extended browsing phases leading to holiday purchases, requiring marketers to nurture early intent while preparing for compressed decision-making. Use smart bidding strategies tied to profitability, applying seasonality adjust...
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10 PPC Truths for 2026: Lessons From Last Year's Debates
Successful PPC campaigns in 2026 require guiding algorithms with human strategy, as platform recommendations often serve the platform's revenue goals, not the advertiser's best interests. Effective automation depends on strategic guardrails to prevent budget waste and requires sufficient conversi...
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Black Friday 2025: Maximize Your Holiday PPC Strategy
Start preparing your PPC strategy early for Black Friday 2025 to maximize returns and avoid high costs and competition. Analyze last year's campaign performance to identify strengths and weaknesses, using insights to shape new strategies and improve targeting. Build and organize campaigns in adva...
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Paid Search: Still Essential in the AI Era
While AI tools enhance efficiency in paid search, a successful strategy still fundamentally depends on human-crafted foundations of audience, structure, and intent to define goals and prevent wasted spending. Automated systems rely entirely on high-quality data and clear account structures to fun...
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Ignore Google Emails? It Could Cost You
A Google Ads expert's failure to properly onboard a new client account and monitor official communications led to a critical breakdown in conversion tracking, as vital warnings about a consent management platform were missed. The loss of conversion data caused Google's smart bidding algorithms to...
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Google Ads Editor 2.11: Campaign Negatives & Smarter Automation
Google Ads Editor 2.11 introduces campaign-level negative keywords for Performance Max campaigns, allowing advertisers to block irrelevant search queries and reduce wasted ad spend. The update enhances transparency with a Performance Max search term report and streamlines account management throu...
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Maximize Your Performance Max Campaigns in 2026: Top Optimization Tips
Performance Max campaigns require a solid foundation with at least 30-50 monthly conversions and should complement, not replace, core Search campaigns. Success hinges on four pillars: budget control and segmentation, audience and keyword targeting, optimized creative assets and landing pages, and...
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Google Ads: 25 Years Later - Better or Worse?
Google Ads has evolved from a simple keyword-based system to a sophisticated AI-driven platform, fundamentally transforming digital marketing over 25 years. Key developments include the shift to pay-per-click, the introduction of Quality Score, remarketing, and the integration of AI tools like Pe...
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Google Ads Tactics to Abandon in 2026
Google Ads is shifting towards automation, reducing the effectiveness of detailed manual control and making certain long-standing PPC tactics less relevant. Strategies like relying heavily on phrase match keywords and using GA4 as the primary conversion action for Smart Bidding are becoming obsol...
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Prep Your Ad Campaigns for Black Friday Now
Review last year's performance thoroughly to identify successes, shortcomings, and changes in the advertising environment, using tools like attribution and auction insights reports. Build and prepare campaigns ahead of time with clear labeling and automated rules to ensure timely activation and c...
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Google Ads API v22: Generative AI & Smarter Bidding
Google Ads API v22 introduces AI-driven enhancements, including generative AI for asset creation and smarter bidding tools, to simplify campaign management and boost performance. New features like the AssetGenerationService automate text and image asset production, while time-segmented diversity ...
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Master Seasonal Demand Spikes: An Ecommerce Guide
Mastering seasonal demand fluctuations is essential for online retailers to maximize profitability and maintain operational stability by strategically managing bidding, inventory, and cross-departmental coordination. Analyzing historical data and conversion lag helps predict trends and time campa...
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Google Ads Unveils New Conversion Tracking Metric
Google Ads has introduced the "Original Conversion Value" column, showing the raw conversion value before automated adjustments like value rules and lifecycle goals. This feature addresses long-standing challenges by providing a clear, unadjusted metric for more accurate campaign analysis, report...
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Google Launches Loyalty Tools for Retail Merchants
Google has launched new tools for retailers to display loyalty program benefits like member pricing and shipping perks directly in search and shopping results, enhancing visibility and customer engagement. The initiative includes a loyalty goal in Google Ads to optimize campaigns for repeat custo...
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Google Ads AI Max: Best Times to Use It (And When to Wait)
Google Ads AI Max offers advanced automated campaign optimization, improving reach and conversions but requires alignment with specific advertising goals and operational constraints. AI Max introduces dynamic search matching, automated ad creation, and smart URL routing, trading precision for dis...
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Google's 2025 Review: The Future of PPC Revealed
Google's 2025 advertising updates were dominated by AI, driving automation and reshaping core platforms like Search, YouTube, and Performance Max toward a more visual, data-centric future. Key product launches focused on new ad placements in AI-powered search experiences and enhanced transparency...
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Google Ads Simplifies Manual CPC Access
Google Ads has simplified access to Manual CPC bidding by making the "Manually set bids" option more visible and directly accessible in the primary campaign creation flow. This update reduces friction for advertisers who prefer direct control, acknowledging that automated Smart Bidding isn't suit...
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PPC Pulse: Google API, YouTube Shorts & LinkedIn Ads Updates
Google launched a Data Manager API to simplify the integration of offline conversion data into Google Ads, enhancing measurement and Smart Bidding for advertisers. YouTube introduced new ad features for Shorts, including comment sections and direct website links, to improve engagement and expand ...
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Google to Retire Call-Only Ads by 2027
Google is retiring Call-Only Ads, with new campaigns ending in February 2026 and a full phase-out by February 2027, shifting focus to Responsive Search Ads with Call Assets. Advertisers should convert existing campaigns, use Call Assets and smart bidding strategies, and link their Google Business...
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Google's $5,000 Secret: Measuring Incrementality with Bayesian Testing
Google has made reliable lift measurement more accessible by enabling incrementality tests with budgets as low as $5,000, using Bayesian statistics to provide actionable insights beyond traditional constraints. Unlike frequentist A/B testing that often yields inconclusive results with limited dat...
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Essential Google Ads Scripts You Can't Afford to Ignore
Google Ads scripts are essential free tools that automate critical account monitoring and maintenance tasks, protecting against common threats like human error, overspending, and broken websites. They enhance performance and efficiency by automating repetitive work such as budget pacing, product ...
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