Google Ads Portfolio Bid Strategy

google ads has a handful of automated
bid strategies that allow you to utilize
google's algorithm
to optimize your bids for certain
campaign goals
we have a video that we just recently
published that goes over those bidding
strategies
you can check that out right here but
there is a little bit more of an
advanced level that we can do with those
bidding strategies
originally those bidding strategies
would be applied to an individual
campaign
they would use performance from that
campaign to optimize toward the goal
that it's trying to hit
but let's say you have a handful of
campaigns maybe some non-brand search
campaigns that all have the same goal
and are a little bit lower volume you
can group those together in what's
called a portfolio bidding strategy
and leverage the data across all those
campaigns in a single bidding strategy
that will mirror and work similar to the
bid strategies at a campaign level
but instead it's going to group all the
data together and you didn't have to
change your campaign structure
to use that bid strategy so in this
video i'm going to show you the three
different ways that you can create
and apply portfolio level bid strategies
to your campaigns
when we're in the google ads interface
there are three different ways that we
can create
and use portfolio level bid strategies
i'm going to go through each one of
those so you can see how to set it up
the first is going to be when you create
a new campaign
it's going to be very easy to set up a
new portfolio level bid strategy so i'm
going to come over here to click create
campaign
click new and now just for the sake of
this video i'm going to save a little
bit of time and fast forward all the way
to the bidding strategy section
okay so now i'm at the budget and
bidding portion of the campaign setup
you can see here that there's already an
option to apply from shared library for
the shared budgets we have a video that
will show you how to set up your shared
budgets if you want to do that but for
this video i'm going to focus on the
bidding section
down below google will automatikally opt
you into whatever it thinks
is the best bidding strategy for you
based on your account history so right
now it's automatikally opting into
target cpa
and it has set a suggested 3.33
cost per conversion if you want to
change your bidding strategy
you can do that in a number of different
ways either by choosing the metric that
you want to focus on so it started off
with conversions but you can choose
conversion value
clicks or impression share but to set up
a portfolio level bid strategy we
actually have to come down here to this
more manual option where you select a
bid strategy directly even though google
says it's not recommended
this is what we'll have to do to get a
portfolio level bid strategy set up
once we click that option you'll see
that there is still the setup that they
had
on the previous screen were still set up
for target cpa
and a 3.33 cpa but we can choose
all of the different bidding strategies
based on their names as opposed to the
objective that we saw in the previous
section
you'll also notike that now we have the
option to use a portfolio level
strategy so i'm gonna click this and now
we have a few different
options that showed up here we still
have target cpa set and there is a
target cpa at three dollars and thirty
cents still being retained here you'll
see that we're creating a new
portfolio strategy you can then give it
a name whatever you want it to be it's
using a placeholder field just because
that's the name of the campaign
and the bidding strategy in place but
you could name this whatever you want it
to be
so let's say i just wanted to name it
target cpa330 now we know what the bid
strategy is and what the target cpa is
for that strategy
to save this strategy you would
basically just go through the remaining
steps
build your campaign and launch it and
this new portfolio strategy will be
retained in your campaigns
you can also apply an existing portfolio
strategy if you want to which you'll see
is this new radio dial right here
unfortunately at the moment we don't
have any portfolio level strategies in
our library so there's nothing to
utilize here but now you know how to
create a new strategy from the
campaign creation process for now i'm
going to cancel out
back out of this campaign and show you
the second way to create a portfolio
strategy
next i want to hop into the shared
library that we were teased in that
campaign creation process
so to find your portfolio bid strategies
we need to hop
up into tools and settings and then go
under the shared library for bid
strategies
the first thing you'll notike here is we
already have one portfolio level bid
strategy set up
for max clicks but you'll remember in
that campaign creation process
we did not see any existing portfolio
bid strategies show up
as an option to choose that's because
the bidding strategy itself was
different we were trying to set up a
target cpa
bidding strategy on that campaign and
this is a max clicks
strategy so utilizing an existing
portfolio bid strategy
means that you have to have one already
created for that same bid strategy type
which is going to be the second
column right here to get started
creating a new bid strategy
simply click the blue plus button and
choose the bid strategy type that you
want to continue this example i'm going
to stik with the target cpa that we
used before
just like in the campaign creation
section we give it a name so i'm going
to go ahead and give this a placeholder
name just like we did before
the next option is to choose the
ownership status of this bid strategy
if you are only in a single google ads
account this will be grayed out and
you'll only be able to choose the
account that you're in but if you have
access to an mcc
where there are multiple different
accounts in there you can make the
mcc the owner of this bid strategy and
use the same bid strategy
across all the different accounts that
you have in that mcc
as opposed to just one so depending on
what your account structures
look like make sure that you're choosing
either the mcc level to be able to share
this bidding strategy
or choose the individual account so that
it will only be
in this account specifically next you
get to choose the specific campaigns
that you want to apply
so in the previous option we were
creating a campaign
and opting into a portfolio bid strategy
creating them
in the shared library means that we
don't have to choose that when the
campaigns are set up
we can add existing campaigns into this
bid strategy so if i click the pencil
it'll bring up all the campaigns that
are in this account
so to add any of them to this portfolio
level bid strategy you just need to
check the box next to it you'll notike
they show up off to the right
and then click done for now i don't
actually want to include
any campaigns in this bid strategy so
i'm going to clear this out and click
cancel
lastly you just need to finish setting
up any of the bid strategy parameters
that you want to use for this portfolio
bid strategy since this is target cpa i
need to add in my target cpa limit that
i want so i'm going to add three dollars
here
but for any other bid strategy you'll
just need to complete
that setup in the same way you would if
you were applying a regular bid strategy
to a single campaign
once you're finished just click save and
now our target cpa
three dollars bid strategy is active in
this account you'll also notike that
over here off to the right there are
metric columns available for you to see
the performance of
this portfolio bid strategy since i just
created it and the max click
strategy is inactive there isn't any
performance data in here but as time
goes on
you can check in to see how your
portfolio bid strategies are performing
either compared to each other or
compared to their individual campaigns
on the campaigns tab this is going to
effectively be a rollup to show you how
this one bid strategy is performing
overall across all campaigns that it's
opted into to give you
one quick easy view to see how it's
doing
so we've toked through how to create a
portfolio bid strategy when you're
creating a new campaign
and how to do it in the shared library
the third option is to apply it to an
existing campaign so i'm just going to
choose one of the campaigns in here
and then to apply a bid strategy we need
to head into settings
if we open up the bidding section of the
campaign settings you'll see that there
already is a target cpa of a dollar 10
set up on this campaign
if we want to opt into a portfolio bid
strategy we need to change bid strategy
type
and then you'll notike that we have an
editor that looks similar to the first
option that we set up
during a new campaign creation just like
in that example we need to
select the bid strategy directly and
then we need to use a portfolio strategy
again we can create a new portfolio
strategy here and give the campaign a
name and a target cpa that we want but
unlike last time
this time we can use an existing
strategy because there already is one
available
so if we wanted to opt in we just click
target cpa as three dollars
we click save portfolio level bid
strategies are
pretty simple to set up and they can
make it much easier for you to make sure
that a group
of campaigns is optimizing towards a
specific goal
without having to set individual bid
strategies
for individual campaigns if you know
they're all going to optimize to the
same metric
why not utilize the shared collective
data gathering
in one bid strategy rather than
segmenting out into multiple different
campaigns
i'm always curious to hear how people's
experiences with these types of tools
worked out
so if you've utilized portfolio bid
strategies and seen good success or
you've struggled with them
or if you just have any follow-up
questions feel free to send us a comment
below
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