Advertising

Skip to main content
Advertising

Experience new growth possibilities with Microsoft Advertising today >

Microsoft Advertising Blog
Page 1 of results

Automated bidding strategies: Target CPA and Maximize Conversions

Target CPA and Maximize Conversions are two new strategies that can help you achieve your conversion performance goals and are centered around your unique business. And Target CPA was the most requested feature across our UserVoice platform this year. These two features are part of the way we are investing into technologies and features that help to automate, empower, and simplify common workloads in search advertising. Examples of simplified workloads include Google Import (recently updated), In-Market Audiences, Dynamic Search Ads, and now Automated Bidding.

Unique platform signals

Like each of our bidding strategies, these new additions will leverage unique signals that are only available in our bidding offering to drive real-time dynamic bidding adjustments. Signals can include a user’s web browser, operating system, search query, and ad copy. We also perform real-time bidding adjustments based on the time of day or day of week, a user’s location, and their device type to better achieve your bidding goal.

Getting started

You can enable Target CPA and Maximize Conversions for campaigns that are targeting locations within the following countries: Australia, Canada, France, Germany, United Kingdom, United States. Conversion-based bidding strategies (Target CPA and Maximize Conversions) require at least 15 conversions in the last 30 days to turn this feature on. We recommend testing any bidding strategy on a few campaigns at first and allowing at least 2-3 weeks for our system to learn and achieve your bidding goal. Find more information in getting started on our help page.

Maximize conversions and Target CPA selections in Bing Ads Tool

Automation with greater controls

Even though you can only set Target CPA and Maximize Conversions at the campaign level, you can individually opt out an ad group or keyword to use Manual bidding. You can do this by changing the bid strategy type of the ad group or keyword to Manual.

Second, when setting up automated bidding, you can optionally set a maximum CPC that automated bidding will not exceed.

Lastly, you can adjust how automated bidding is performing with bid modifiers. Any -100% bid modifiers continue to opt you out of the related targeting option (device type, location, ad schedule or audience). However, all other bid modifier values (-90% to +900%) will be applied to your automated bids. We recommend only using bid modifiers with automated bidding if you want to increase or decrease the amount of clicks you are getting from the related targeting option. Note that bid adjustments do not change your CPA goal and may cause your bids to go above your maximum CPC.

Additional information can be found for all of our bidding strategies on our Help page.

Comparing bidding strategies

Additional information can be found for all of our bidding strategies on our Help page, as well as an overview video. 

For Manual and Enhanced CPC bid strategy you do not need conversion tracking. For Maximize conversions and target CPA you don't set your bids or use a third party management tool. For maximizing clicks you do not need conversion tracking and you cannot set bids yourself or use third party management tools.

Questions or comments?

Try out any of our new bidding strategies as they become available this week. If you have any feedback or questions, feel free to contact us via Twitter, visit the Bing Ads Feature Suggestion Forum, or send your feedback directly to BingAds-feedback@microsoft.com.