Google AI Automates Ad Bidding and Budget Pacing

Google has unveiled some soon-to-be-released artificial intelligence (AI)-powered bidding and budgeting tools for Search and Shopping.

“By pairing smarter bidding strategies with flexible budgets, you can capture high-value opportunities without the manual heavy lifting,” Josh Braverman, group product manager, Google Ads, wrote in a Thursday (May 7) blog post announcing the tools.

One tool currently in beta is journey-aware bidding, which enables advertisers to track their full lead-to-sales journeys, thereby helping Google AI better understand complex lead generation customer journeys.

“By seeing the whole picture, Google AI can better predict what works and optimize your performance,” Braverman said in the post.

In another upcoming offering, Google will extend its Smart Bidding Exploration capability to Performance Max and Shopping campaigns. Smart Bidding Exploration helps advertisers capture less obvious queries that they didn’t anticipate and weren’t able to win before. This capability was introduced to Search campaigns last year and has delivered an average of 27% more unique converting users.

“Soon you’ll be able to use that same capability to reach new customers and capture additional conversions across both Performance Max and Shopping campaigns,” Braverman said in the post.

Google will also upgrade its budget pacing in Search and Shopping Campaigns, enabling it to better predict consumer demand and follow demand automatically. These upgrades will be rolled out in the coming months.

“With demand-led pacing, Google AI will better optimize spend to follow consumer demand — capturing more demand on peak days and reducing spend on slower days — all while never going beyond your monthly budget and daily spending limits,” Braverman said in the post.

PYMNTS reported April 29 that executives at Google parent company Alphabet said during an earnings call that AI-driven Search queries are at an all-time high and that more than 30% of search ad spend now uses AI-enabled campaign tools. This reflects how advertisers are adjusting to conversational and context-rich queries, according to the report.

“AI is boosting our ability to deeply understand user intent for a given search query and to find the most relevant ad,” Alphabet Chief Business Officer Philipp Schindler said during the call. “Even when we don’t have a direct user query, we’re making significant strides in improving relevance.”

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