Google’s Smart Bidding is easy and works well, however, there are a few limitations you should consider before putting all your eggs in the Smart Bidding basket:
- Google Only. Are you only advertising on Google? Didn’t think so. Don’t you want a bidding solution that works across multiple publishers and channels?
- Doesn’t leverage External Signals. There are a lot of unique factors that impact your performance as a business that are outside the auction--think ratings, social media buzz, and new product launches. Shouldn’t the machine learning that is calculating your bids know about these things?
- Struggles with advanced metrics and longer sales cycles. Are you optimizing to all downstream events or merely focused on leads?
- Lacks budget pacing or “what-if” forecasting. Creating accurate forecasts empowers you to evaluate new optimization opportunities before testing them out in the real world, reducing wasted ad spend.
- Limited control and transparency. Without access to the complete bid history of any keyword or any individual auction, there’s no way for an advertiser to unpack the selection criteria, optimization signals, or decisioning systems for their campaigns.
Smart Bidding Vs. Marin Bidding
| Google Smart Bidding | Marin Bidding | Marin's Advantage | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Publishers | Google, Microsoft, Yahoo! Japan, Amazon, Apple Search Ads, LinkedIn | Independence. We optimize for the advertiser, not the publisher. | |
| Target Impression Share | ✔︎ | ✔︎✔︎ | Awareness Targeting uses Impression Rate which is more frequently available and reactive than Impression Share. |
| Maximize Conversions | ✔︎ | ✔︎ | |
| Maximize Conversion Value | ✔︎ | ✔︎ | |
| Specify Value per Conversion Type | ✔︎ | ✔︎✔︎ | Value per conversion specified as part of the Strategy. |
| Customer Lifetime Value | ✔︎ | Automates calculation of expected value from a lead by incorporating every step of the funnel into the bid. | |
| Seasonality Adjustments | ✔︎ | ✔︎✔︎ | Automatically applies boost using your historical data, with the ability to input a longer projection into the future. |
| Custom Modifiers | ✔︎ | Automatically react to external data, such as news coverage or new product launches. | |
| Bid Overrides and Rules | ✔︎ | Fine-grained tuning of bidding parameters to meet the needs of your business. | |
| Device, Audience, Geo | ✔︎ | ✔︎✔︎ | Separate goals by device. |
| 'What-If' Forecasting | ✔︎ | "What-if" simulations that visualize the allowable spend targets for the current month in order to hit your targets. | |
| Budget Pacing | ✔︎ | Plan and optimize your budgets with projected, actual, and cumulative advertising spend for the current month. | |
| Frequency | Every 4 hours | Transparency on bid calculations. | |
| Auction-Time Signals | ✔︎ | ✔︎ | Marin bidding works in coordination with eCPC which adjusts bids based on auction signals. |
Note: A green cell indidates a feature that exists in Marin Bidding, but does not exist in Google Smart Bidding. A double check-mark (✔︎✔︎) indicates that both bidding solutions offer the feature, but the Marin Bidding version is more advanced and/or easier to use.
