Setting Your Bid Strategy: Enhanced CPC

What is SmartBid?

SmartBid is Realize's core machine learning algorithm that utilizes historic data to predict the CVR and adjust your campaign’s bid accordingly. SmartBid is designed to maximize your campaign performance at scale.

What is Enhanced CPC?

Enhanced CPC is a bidding strategy powered by Realize's core machine learning algorithm (SmartBid) that automatically optimizes your campaign's baseline bid in the auction, increasing on high-value impressions while reducing bids on impressions that are less likely to lead to a conversion.

Enhanced CPC ensures that you are bidding the lowest amount required to win any impression by reducing all winning bids to match the second highest bid (second price auction). You may see an example of how Enhanced CPC makes modifications here. 

At any time you may modify your baseline bid per individual site with Enhanced CPC to optimize for performance. Learn more here.

Benefits of Enhanced CPC:

1. Leverage network learnings: Enhanced CPC operates according to historic performance data of your campaigns. The deep learning algorithm takes into account historical campaign performance of similar campaigns - along with user data and context - and then produces a CPC bid based on the likelihood to convert.
2. Incremental scale: With the ability to run optimized bids across all 20,000+ sites on Realize's network, Enhanced CPC can increase your campaign reach exponentially - with less risk.
3. Conversion-based learning: Enhanced CPC maintains competitive bids on the publishers and audiences that are most likely to drive conversions for your marketing objectives. Through automatic bid adjustments, Enhanced CPC prioritizes higher conversion rates, at scale. 
   
4. Reliable optimizations: The SmartBid algorithm continuously runs back-end A/B tests to validate a user’s likelihood to convert. Enhanced CPC will only alter your baseline bid when it outperforms the results of fixed bidding.
5. Efficient bidding: Enhanced CPC reduces winning CPC bids to match the second highest bid of that auction. This ensures all recommendations meet the market rate for that impression.

 

New Campaigns and Ads

Enhanced CPC helps you successfully launch new campaigns and ads. Through semi-autonomous bid modifications, it will alter your baseline bid through Learning, Expedited Learning, and Scaling.

Throughout Expedited Learning, your Campaign Bid may be increased in order to win the best impressions and clicks to accurately estimate CTR, but SmartBid will continue to manage bids to ensure they are the lowest required to secure the impression during the learning process. Learn more about Expedited Learning here. 

During all other phases your campaign bid will increase or decrease in relationship with the opportunity of a given impression. Learn about all ad and campaign statuses here.

 

How to Implement Enhanced CPC

You may update your Bid Strategy from multiple fields. The following instructions indicate how to opt into SmartBid when setting up a new campaign.

1. Create a new Campaign
2. Navigate to the Bidding and Budget section and click on the drop down that says 'What do you want to focus on?'
3. Click on Bid Control
4. Under Bid Type, click on Cost per click (CPC)
5. Toggle Enhanced CPC and insert your baseline CPC bid

Additional Notes on Enhanced CPC

• All of SmartBid's bidding strategies work most effectively with the Taboola Pixel, which feeds the SmartBid algorithm with conversion events that help drive better optimizations and improve the bidding mechanism.
• With Enhanced CPC specifically, you may always make by-site bid adjustments to optimize sites that perform well. Learn more about bid modifications per site here. 
• The actual Cost per Click (CPC) may be higher for some sites and lower for others, contingent on the average adjustments Enhanced CPC will take. During Expedited Learning you may see higher bids than normal. You can learn more about Expedited learning here. 
  
• You will still be able to adjust bids per site. Making a manual adjustment to a site's bid will adjust the baseline bid for that site, and Enhanced CPC will optimize accordingly.