What is Custom Bidding?

New functionalities emerge every day that allow us to automate processes, save time and improve the quality of information through machine learning. Custom Bidding is a mixture of these characteristics, since unlike standard or automatic bids, with Custom Bidding we can customize the algorithm based on real business objectives. Through a script created in DV360, we will provide more knowledge to the algorithm to apply machine learning in an optimal and unique way for each client and campaign.

What is Custom Bidding and how does it contribute to our campaigns?

Custom Bidding is able to combine our business insights with the Google algorithm. This union between our knowledge of the campaign and its objectives, added to Google’s machine learning, will allow us to align our goals with the advertiser’s business objectives.

How does it work?

Very simple, the first thing we must do is ask ourselves two questions:

What is our goal? If our objective is a standard CPM, CB is not necessary. On the contrary, if we want to optimize towards other goals and KPIs we can consider CB as a solution,
Do we want to manage the campaign manually? In case our priority is not to manually configure bids and we prefer that Google’s algorithm maximize the effectiveness of our campaigns, we recommend applying CB.

Second, we identify the signals, we must set our objectives (KPIs), what we are measuring and how we are going to optimize based on it. This takes us to step three, the design of the script, to develop it it is not necessary to be a code expert, in the help center we can find information and practical examples about it. These are the 3 main aggregate models, each of them is applicable to the different use cases that we will discuss below:

Sum-aggregate: In all cases, add all the weights.
Max_Aggregate: In all cases, it only takes into account the maximum weight.
First_match_aggregate: All conversions, find the first interaction that occurs within the script sequence.

Once the script has been created in DV360, and assigned as a bid algorithm to our test insertion order (replacing the non-personalized options offered by the platform), the algorithm will optimize based on the rules established in our script. If we have already completed the previous steps, it is time to select our script as the bid algorithm within our insertion order and start checking results between the test Insertion Order and the new Insertion Order with the custom algorithm.

Use cases

To help us better understand each possible scenario, we have 6 previously defined use cases:

Weighted Conversions: All goals contribute to the achievement of the final objective. We can give weights for each step of the conversion funnel, prioritizing those actions that have the most value for the advertiser.
Activity Value: Unlike weighing only based on specific events such as floodlights, this model allows us to optimize based on custom u-variables. That is, we can give different weights to our custom variables collected in Campaign manager to increase the profit.
Transaction ROAS: We can use the value of each product or service to adjust the value of sales. The advantage is in differentiating the sales values by product, not all sales are worth the same.
Google Analytics: with GA360 we can weight based on different events within our site, as long as we have a premium account and we have all those goals configured. For example, users who have placed an order are more valued, or those who have spent more time browsing our website.
Brand Signals: We use branding signals such as viewability, full video, and others, to make the most of this knowledge in our campaigns.
Unified Conversions: With the help of Campaign Manager and Google Analytics we are able to collect all that information that we cannot measure only with floodlights. Example: in a case of weighted conversions, with offline conversion we give more weight to the one that has the most value. In this case, we can unify online and offline conversions under the same algorithm, being able to give them the same value.

Each of them is unique and will vary depending on the weighting we give to each step, action or sales values.

Case of success

Currently, we have active several cases of advertisers with Custom Bidding, so we already have a base with which to move towards new projects. The most recent example is a banking client in which we have implemented the case of “weighted conversions”, where we weigh the steps prior to the conversion. We can ensure that the above premises are met, based on the results obtained to date. Real data:

With a lower investment and half the impressions issued, the Custom Bidding test is having overall CTRs 0.10 percentage points higher.
The most important fact is that the CPA of Custom Bidding is 30% lower than the CPA of the standard campaign.
The number of conversions in CB is 39% higher than in the standard insertion order.

How to boost your campaigns thanks to programmatic advertising this Black Friday

With the arrival of November, the final stretch begins for many companies. One of the most important dates for consumption is Christmas, and it is time to give that last push to close the year. The Christmas feeling floods us and we want to buy gifts for our loved ones and why not, also for ourselves. The Christmas shopping season begins long before the arrival of Santa Claus and a date has been imposed on our calendars for a few years now: Black Friday. But, what will Black Friday bring us this year? In principle, everything seems to indicate that purchases will be increasingly online to the detriment of the physical store. Throughout this year we have been able to see how online commerce increased, mainly motivated by restrictions on mobility and fear due to the pandemic. Everything seems to indicate that this trend will continue during the Christmas season. If we focus on the imminent Black Friday, Google has made an X-ray of the current consumer and defines it as a connected, far-sighted and prudent user. Not only are users going to prioritize digital channels when making their purchases this Black Friday, but the search for gifts will also do so in the digital medium. In addition, if we take into account that only 7% of consumers have already decided what they are going to spend their money on during Black Friday, we can conclude that brands must reinforce their digital media strategies, they still have time to convince that indecisive user and the competition this year will be more brutal than ever. Faced with this situation, programmatic advertising is presented as a perfect tool to reach the right audience and stand out from the competition during these dates. Thanks to automation and the purchase of spaces in real time, programmatic purchase allows you to define messages based on the user and the moment they are within the conversion funnel. In order to properly plan our programmatic campaigns in the weeks leading up to Black Friday, it is important to take into account certain aspects in order to successfully achieve our goals.

Accurate and relevant segmentations The audience must be the central point of all our strategy. Defining our audiences correctly will allow us to reach a user interested in our offer. Audiences should be large enough to have great impact and reach, but they should be relevant. Thanks to the study and analysis of our users, it will allow us to identify affinities that we can later activate. This will optimize the resources of the campaign and impact the user with content related to their interests, which will make our advertising campaigns more user-friendly and the user will feel more receptive to them.

Personalize the message by taking advantage of First Party Data Users will show a more favorable response to personalized messages than to more generic messages. We must take advantage of the potential of all 1st party data and launch specific campaigns for users based on their status and how close they are to converting. For this we can create differentiated messages depending on whether they have only visited the product page of our website, abandoned the shopping cart or stayed in the last step before confirming the sale. In addition, we can activate dynamic creatives that are built from the data collected by the variables of the Floodlights in order to impact the user with personalized creatives about the specific product or service in which they have been interested.

Optimize the purchase The Christmas shopping season is one of the times in which brands invest more budget and demand a greater volume of inventory from media, so CPMs tend to be higher than the rest of the year. Adjust your CPM enough to maintain a valuable inventory and a good user experience, but bid more aggressively on those strategies that give you the best results. In addition, it may be interesting to close some PMP with premium supports for those most important campaigns, you can ensure that you have sufficient inventory available to bid on.

Don’t forget about creativity Considering the high level of competition during these dates, creativity is more important than ever. The idea is to stand out and differentiate ourselves from the competition. It is essential to design creatives that are eye-catching, with a message focused on our audience and a clear and direct call to action (CTA). We must have different versions depending on where the user is in the conversion funnel. In addition, incorporating notorious formats such as video, audio or skins will allow us to generate storytelling and reinforce our branding campaigns, making a difference compared to the competition.

Plan your campaign in advance and anticipate yourself Users begin to investigate their purchases in the previous weeks and many of them already close their purchases a few days before, so it is essential to have our campaign planned well in advance to be able to activate a few weeks before Black Friday , the competition will not wait.

The entire programmatic strategy during the Black Friday campaign, in addition to helping us increase and achieve our sales goals, will bring us other benefits such as the generation of new traffic to the web, which will allow the user to know our products and services and it will end up being translated into the generation of new leads, subscribers and potential new clients. Last but not least, all of our actions will allow us to feed our audiences with new users to increase and refresh their volume for our retargeting strategies and future campaigns. We cannot forget that after the Christmas campaign, the sales season begins and taking advantage of these audiences will be essential in order to achieve all our objectives.

The future of cookies

Who has not considered what will happen to the digital ecosystem as a result of the so-called news of the blocking of third-party cookies in browsers? A few days ago, a Google Attribution, Measurement and Omnichannel specialist, commented the following about the digital environment and the treatment of audiences: “We have lived in the Wild West”. We can not agree more. That is why we understand that the digital market, and with it the treatment of user information, is undergoing so many changes. First of all, it is essential to know the difference between own and third-party cookies. The 1st party cookies are those collected directly by the main server and the 3rd party cookies that are collected in the publisher’s landing but are sent to third-party servers, such as Campaign Manager or Facebook. Once the difference between the two is understood, the epicenter of the problem arises when Google communicates that in 2022 it will block third-party cookies in its Chrome browser. The industry, directly and indirectly, is urgently demanding a change in the digital market and with it in the treatment of data. This demand translates into three main premises :

Users: the user has stated that they do not want us to control them and that is why they browse incognito or even take time to download Ad Blockers.
Regulation: increasingly restrictive consent laws such as GDPR, ePrivacy Directive, CCPA, IAB transparency & Consent Framework, ECJ Planet49 case, National DPAs announcements. Increasingly strict regulations on the treatment of user data and with it, the collection of cookies.
Technology: as we know, ITP (Safari) and ETP (Firefox) by default block third-party cookies and as we have commented previously, Chrome adds to this construction of a more private web environment.

Why should we care? How is it going to affect us?

This new digital ecosystem is going to require an adaptation process because it will mean a change in the way we measure the data of our business and of each client. In addition, certain functionalities of our technologies will be altered.

Audiences: The collection of audiences such as tag-based audiences (Campaign Manager floodlight), frequency cap and DMP audiences will be affected. This will increase the importance of the 1st party data that each client has stored in addition to its activation.
The personalization of the content of the ads will also be affected.
Increase the pressure on the measurement, reporting and attribution of conversions. Reports such as the identification of unique users and overlap will be limited.
The optimization strategies such as CPA or bid to maximize conversions will also be affected by lower volume cookies will experience platforms.

Today’s solutions

We must take into account this new digital context with limited cookies and begin to delve into possible qualified solutions that we already have at our disposal. The Google Marketing Platform ecosystem offers us extensive advanced solutions that we are also already exploiting today.

Google audiences like Affinity and In Market: Google will continue to have a broad reach of users based on their affinities and purchasing interests.
Programmatic Deals through Display & Video 360: with guaranteed programmatic agreements and other types of deals such as Preferred and Private, we can reach our target audience, thanks to the segmentations offered by the different media.
Offline conversions: the GMP ecosystem allows us to import offline conversions, so this solution would allow us to obtain greater visibility on the platform of our user’s behavior and make more beneficial decisions.
Customer Match: creation of audiences based on the uploading of databases of our users to platforms such as Display & Video 360 and Google Ads.
Ads Data Hub: A tool that allows you to send 1st party data to BigQuery and analyze it against the campaign data. One of the objectives of this tool is to create highly qualified audiences but in groups of at least 50 users, in order to maintain the qualification of the data without losing the user’s privacy.
Server to Server: in this case a server, such as the Tag Manager Server, directly receives the information from the DataLayer from the web, stores and processes this information in order to subsequently send it to Google Analytics.
Finally, the disappearance of the 3rd party cookies will not affect all contexts. Neither mobile nor Smart TV will be affected, so we also recommend exploiting these other types of environments that are also booming in the current digital ecosystem.

We are aware that this new ecosystem still has many unknowns and therefore we recommend taking time to establish a solid strategy based on it. Google is said to start testing in 2020, so we have time to catch up!