Google Ads Portfolio Bid Strategy

Google Ads has a handful of automated bid strategies that allow you to utilize Google’s algorithm to optimize your bids for certain campaign goals. We have a video that we just recently published that goes over those bidding strategies. You can check that out right here. 

But there is a little bit more of an advanced level that we can do with those bidding strategies. Originally, those bidding strategies would be applied to an individual campaign. They would use performance from that campaign to optimize toward the goal that it’s trying to hit. But let’s say you have a handful of campaigns. Maybe some non-brand search campaigns that all have the same goal and are a little bit lower volume. 

You can group those together in what’s called a portfolio bidding strategy and leverage the data across all those campaigns in a single bidding strategy that will mirror and work similar to the bid strategies at a campaign level. But instead, it’s going to group all the data together, and you didn’t have to change your campaign structure to use that bid strategy. So in this video, I’m going to show you the three different ways that you can create and apply portfolio level bid strategies to your campaigns. 

When we’re in the Google Ads interface, there are three different ways that we can create and use portfolio level bid strategies. I’m going to go through each one of those so you can see how to set it up. The first is going to be when you create a new campaign. It’s going to be very easy to set up a new portfolio level bid strategy. So I’m going to come over here and click Create campaign. Click New. And now just for the sake of this video, I’m going to save a little bit of time and fast forward all the way to the bidding strategy section. 

Okay, so now we’re in the budget and bidding portion of the campaign setup. You can see here that there’s already an option to apply from a shared library for the shared budgets. We have a video that will show you how to set up your shared budgets if you want to do that. But for this video, I’m going to focus on the bidding section down below. 

Google will automatically opt you into whatever it thinks is the best bidding strategy for you based on your account history. So right now, it’s automatically opting into target CPA, and it has set a suggested $3.33 cent cost per conversion. If you want to change your bidding strategy, you can do that in a number of different ways by choosing the metric that you want to focus on.  So it started off with conversions, but you can choose conversion value clicks, or impression share. 

But to set up a portfolio level bid strategy, we actually have to come down here to this more manual option where you select a bid strategy directly. Even though Google says it’s not recommended, this is what we’ll have to do to get a portfolio level bid strategy setup. Once we click that option, you’ll see that there is still the setup that they had on the previous screen. 

We’re still set up for target CPA and a $3.33 cent CPA, but we can choose all of the different bidding strategies based on their names as opposed to the objectives that we saw in the previous section. You’ll also notice that now we have the option to use a portfolio level strategy. So I’m going to click this, and now we have a few different options that showed up here. 

We still have target CPA set, and there is a target CPA at $3.30 still being retained here. You’ll see that we’re creating a new portfolio strategy. You can then give it a name. Whatever you want it to be. It’s using a placeholder field just because that’s the name of the campaign and the bidding strategy in place. But you could name this whatever you want to be. So let’s say I just wanted to name that target CPA $3.30. Now we know what the bid strategy is and what the target CPA is for that strategy. 

To save this strategy, you would basically just go through the remaining steps, build your campaign, and launch it. And this new portfolio strategy will be retained in your campaigns. You can also apply an existing portfolio strategy if you want to which you’ll see is this new radio dial right here. Unfortunately, at the moment, we don’t have any portfolio level strategies in our library. So there’s nothing to utilize here. But now you know how to create a new strategy from the campaign creation process. For now, I’m going to cancel out, back out of this campaign, and show you the second way to create a portfolio strategy. 

Next, I want to hop into the shared library that we were teased in that campaign creation process. So to find your portfolio bid strategies, you need to hop up into tools and settings and then go into the shared library for bid strategies. The first thing you’ll notice here is we already have one portfolio level bid strategy set up for max clicks. But you’ll remember in that campaign creation process, we did not see any existing portfolio bid strategies show up as an option to choose. 

That’s because the bidding strategy itself was different. We were trying to set up a target CPA bidding strategy on that campaign, and this is a max clicks strategy. So utilizing an existing portfolio bid strategy means that you have to have one already created for that same bid strategy type which is going to be the second column right here. 

To get started creating a new bid strategy, simply click the blue plus button and choose the bid strategy type that you want. To continue this example, I’m going to stick with the target CPA that we used before. Just like in the campaign creation section, we give it a name so I’m going to go ahead and give us a placeholder name just like we did before. 

The next option is to choose the ownership status of this bid strategy. If you are only in a single Google Ads account, this will be grayed out and you’ll only be able to choose the account that you’re in. But if you have access to an MCC, where there are multiple different accounts in there, you can make the MCC the owner of this bid strategy and use the same bid strategy across all the different accounts that you have in that MCC as opposed to just one. 

So depending on what your account structures look like, make sure that you’re choosing either the MCC level to be able to share this bidding strategy or choose the individual account so that it will only be in this account specifically. Next, you get to choose the specific campaigns that you want to apply. 

So in the previous option, we were creating a campaign and opting into a portfolio bid strategy. Creating them in the shared library means that we don’t have to choose that when the campaigns are set up. We can add existing campaigns into this bid strategy. If I click the pencil, it’ll bring up all the campaigns that are in this account. To add any of them to this portfolio level bid strategy, you just need to check the box next to it. You’ll notice they show up off to the right, and then click Done. 

For now, I don’t actually want to include any campaigns in this bid strategy. So I’m gonna clear this out and click Cancel. Lastly, you just need to finish setting up any of the bid strategy parameters that you want to use for this portfolio bid strategy. Since this is target CPA, I need to add in my target CPA limit that I want. So I’m gonna add $3 here, but for any other bid strategy, you’ll just need to complete that setup in the same way you would if you were applying a regular bid strategy to a single campaign. 

Once you’re finished, just click Save. And now our target CPA $3 bid strategy is active in this account. You’ll also notice that over here off to the right there are metric columns available for you to see the performance of this portfolio bid strategy. Since I just created it, and the max click strategy is inactive, there isn’t any performance data in here. But as time goes on, you can check in to see how your portfolio bid strategies are performing either compared to each other or compared to their individual campaigns. On the campaign’s tab, this is going to effectively be a roll up to show you how this one bid strategy is performing overall across all campaigns that has opted into to give you one quick, easy view to see how it’s doing. 

So we’ve talked through how to create a portfolio bid strategy when you’re creating a new campaign and how to do it in the shared library. The third option is to apply it to an existing campaign. So I’m just going to choose one of the campaigns in here. And then to apply a bid strategy, we need to head into settings. 

If we open up the bidding section of the campaign settings, you’ll see that there already is a target CPA of $1.10 set up on this campaign. If we want to opt into a portfolio bid strategy, we’ll want to change the bid strategy type. And then you’ll notice that we have an editor that looks similar to the first option that we set up during a new campaign creation. 

Just like in that example, we need to select the bid strategy directly, and then we need to use a portfolio strategy. Again, we can create a new portfolio strategy here and give the campaign a name and a target CPA that we want. But unlike last time, this time we can use an existing strategy because there already is one available. So if you wanted to opt in, we just click target CPA is $3. And we click Save. 

Portfolio level bid strategies are pretty simple to set up, and they can make it much easier for you to make sure that a group of campaigns is optimizing towards a specific goal without having to set individual bid strategies for individual campaigns. If you know they’re all going to optimize to the same metric, why not utilize the shared collective data gathering in one bid strategy rather than segmenting out into multiple different campaigns? I’m always curious to hear how people’s experiences with these types of tools worked out. So if you’ve utilized portfolio bid strategies and seeing good success, or you’ve struggled with them, or if you just have any follow up questions, feel free to send us a comment below.

Written by Michelle Morgan