Why apply ad group targets?
When you set a target CPA or ROAS, Google will try to reach this target on average across the campaign. However, within a campaign, different ad groups often have drastically different performance with CPA and ROAS values either much lower or much higher than the average.
The adjust ad group targets improvement works to bring CPA and ROAS values closer to the average. By doing this we are discouraging Google from bidding for queries leading to very expensive conversions, or low ROAS, while allowing for more budget to go to queries fetching a lower conversion price or a higher ROAS.
This improvement automates the time consuming task of running performance reports, identifying ad groups further from the average, calculating adjustments, and continuously updating individual ad group targets in order to help boost overall campaign performance.
How does this improvement work?
This improvement finds campaigns within search, display and shopping channels, which are using a smart bidding strategy with a set CPA or ROAS target (Target CPA, Target ROAS, Maximise conversions with target CPA, Maximise conversion value with target ROAS).
Within these campaigns Opteo identifies ad groups which are over- or under-performing relative to the campaign’s average CPA or ROAS, and calculates a recommended adjustment to bring the performance closer to the average.
Applying the recommendations will reduce spend on certain ad groups by restricting targets, and increase conversions / conversion value on others by loosening the targets. This should allow for smarter budget allocation within the campaign.
Technical notes
Adjustments are capped at +/- 30% to avoid making too drastic changes too quickly. We want to avoid disrupting the smart bidding algorithm.
If a campaign is budget capped, we will only ever recommend restricting the target: increasing ROAS or decreasing CPA.
In order to make meaningful changes we will not recommend a target adjustment if the same would be below 3%.
Opteo dynamically determines "minimum clicks" - the minimum number of clicks we require before we can evaluate the performance of an ad group and make a recommended ad group target adjustment.
If you've set a target CPA or a target ROAS in campaign groups, Opteo will take this into account - we won't recommend restricting an ad group that is outperforming your campaign group target and we won't recommend loosening a target that is underperforming vs your campaign group target.