Hands? Who needs them?
Microsoft has decided that all campaigns on the Microsoft Audience Network will soon upgrade to Enhanced CPC (eCPC) – its fully automated bidding system.
Table of Contents
Hands off
eCPC will automatically adjust your bids in real time to increase chances of conversions. Oh, and your average CPC won’t exceed whatever base bid you have in place.
And if that makes you nervous, Microsoft promised that eCPC uses many different search signals to optimize for best results, including search queries, bid modifiers, location, ad copy, and more.
Going, gone
Starting April 24, manual bidding won’t be available for new campaigns, and all existing image and feed campaigns on manual cost-per-click (CPC) will be upgraded to eCPC.
What you need to do
Nothing, actually. The upgrade doesn’t require any action on your part.
However, you can do a few things to set yourself up for optimal success:
- Conversion tracking. Make sure you have Universal Event Tracking (UET) tag on all pages on your website and all your conversion goals set up.
- Offline conversions. If you have them, upload them daily.
- Attribution model. Make it last-touch so you can optimize based on both view-through and click-based view conversions.
The transition should be complete by April 28.
Why we care
If you prefer the sense of control that comes with manual bidding, ditching it may feel awkward.
For better or worse, it looks like ad operations are moving towards full automatization. Hopefully that takes extra work off your hands and gets you more ROI. Guess we’ll see.