How to Create a Portfolio Bidding Strategy
There are many bid strategies available for you to use in order to get the best results out of your campaigns. If you’re curious about what these other settings mean and if they’re a good fit, check out our blog on choosing the best bid strategy for you. However, there is one bid strategy that requires a little more work than clicking over to a different setting, which is called a portfolio bidding strategy.
A portfolio bidding strategy is a setting you can use to help reach target performance goals across your account. The most recent instance where I used a portfolio strategy was to switch over a few campaigns to tCPA bidding when the conversion rate was a bit on the lower side for a specific client. We had a previous history of bids escalating too high when we switched over to tCPA, so with portfolio bidding we were able to set bid caps at a range we thought acceptable. If you are in a similar situation, or if your budget is fairly limited portfolio bidding can help mitigate any drastic increase in bidding or spend.
In this blog I will show you how to set up a portfolio bidding strategy to use within your own account.
Log into your Google Ads account and click “Tools & Settings” on the top right of your navigation bar, which should open a menu that looks like this below. Under “shared library” click on “Bid strategies.”
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From there you’ll be taken to a library of your bid strategies within your account. If you don’t have any bid strategies yet, it will look something like this. Click on the ‘+’ sign to create a new portfolio bid strategy.
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A few options appear now: Target CPA, Target ROAS, Maximize clicks, target impression share, Target search page location, Target outranking share, and Enhanced CPC.
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For the purpose of this blog I continued with ‘Target CPA,’ since that was what I mentioned previously.
Once you’re here, the steps are pretty straight forward. Setting up a name for your new bid strategy and its target CPA. However, in order to set bid limits you need to click on ‘Advanced options’ shown below:
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Once you’re done setting everything up click ‘save’ and that’s it! You have a new portfolio bidding strategy you can use across multiple campaigns.
Now in order to change a campaign over to your new portfolio bidding strategy, you’ll want to go to your campaign settings under ‘Bidding.’ Once here you’ll click on ‘change bid strategy’ and ‘select bid strategy directly’ afterwards.
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That will give you the option to select a portfolio strategy shown here:
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I hope you take full advantage of this feature, since it’s been so useful for us! However, it is worth noting that even if using a portfolio bidding strategy prevents bids from spiking too high, it is not a guarantee for improved performance. You still need to closely monitor performance on the campaigns using this new bid strategy.
