Conversion Bid Strategy: Why Automation is Good for Your Business

So, you’ve carefully curated the most engaging content, and strategically targeted your audience, but what’s the point if you’re not improving your Return-on-Ad-Spend? Sometimes the best content and targeting won’t be enough to meet your goals without the correct Conversion Bid Strategy implementation. 

You may already be using Conversion Bid Strategy for your Outbrain campaigns, but you’ve only gone semi-manual, or you may not have tried it yet at all. Bummer! Automation helps you increase revenue and maximize efficiency, while requiring less overall effort. But just to make sure we’re all on the same page, let’s start at the beginning. 

What is Conversion Bid Strategy?

Simply put, Conversion Bid Strategy (CBS) automatically adjusts and optimizes your bid strategy to help you hit your goals, doing all the heavy lifting for you! CBS is an automated feature, which means it optimizes campaigns based on the goal you pre-define, without you having to do any extra work.

Our advanced AI and machine learning automatically adjusts your CPC (increase/ decrease) in order to get to your desired conversion goal. There are four modes for you to choose from when running campaigns on CBS – three fully automated, and one semi-automated.

Introducing the 4 Conversion Bid Strategy Modes

Of the four available CBS modes, three are fully automated, which is the best option for you. For advertisers who prefer to remain on a partially manual operation, there is always Semi-Manual mode.

AUTOMATED MODES – RECOMMENDED

Target ROAS: Adjusts your CPCs to bring as many conversions as possible within your target ROAS.

Target CPA: Adjusts your CPCs to bring as many conversions as possible within your target CPA.

Max Conversions: Adjusts CPCs to bring as many conversions as possible within your set budget. 

SEMI-AUTOMATED MODE

Semi Manual: Outbrain adjusts CPCs for each impression while letting you adjust your campaign’s CPC.

Why is it Recommended to Use Fully Automated CBS Modes? 

As a media planner or digital marketer, you’re juggling a lot of balls in the air at once. In recent years, the best adtech solutions have been integrating automation to eliminate the routine daily tasks that eat up your precious time. That’s exactly what CBS modes are designed to do.

Automating your Outbrain campaign’s optimization helps you increase revenue and maximize efficiency, while requiring less overall effort. It saves time and allows resources to be diverted elsewhere, so you can focus on creating more successful campaigns, building your client’s strategy, and ultimately invest in getting more clients.

CBS is not only a fantastic way to save time. It also allows you to leverage algorithms and machine learning to optimize campaigns, taking the heavy lifting and guesswork out of setting bids to meet your performance goals.

From optimization to automation

When it comes down to it, manual bidding still requires significant investment of time in monitoring performance, judging if the bid needs to change, deciding what that change should be, and then actually making that change. On the other hand, bid automation takes into account numerous bidding signals that aren’t visible to advertisers and uses machine learning to set appropriate bids. These hidden signals bring substantial added value to your campaigns, because they help to decipher user intent and interest, and take these into account automatically as part of the bidding process.

For some advertisers, the idea of relying completely on Outbrain algorithms and turning on the fully-automated mode may feel a bit scary. However, CBS is designed to bring you better results with far less manual effort, and it works. 

Get real-world results! See automation in action

Many Outbrain advertisers are generating excellent ROAS with automated bidding modes, far better than what they could achieve with semi-manual or manual. See how Schubkraft, an online marketing agency, saved 3.5 hours a week and lowered CPA by 9% just by going to an automated mode. Or how Ogee skincare brand reached peak 180% ROAS and got 76% lower CPC than Facebook’s benchmark for the vertical with automated CBS. “It’s scary how well CBS worked. We loved just watching the traffic and conversions come in after just setting it and forgetting it.”

Now it’s your turn! Make the shift from optimization to automation today, and see what it can do for you.