This article was last updated in 2020. Tools and interfaces change; the principles still apply. Ask us if you want the current version of this advice.

Earlier this month saw the decision by Google AdWords to take down the close variants option, which caused a lot of ripples in the digital marketing community. However, the latest decision that Google made to its AdWords platform may make up for that because they recently announced the addition of a feature that gives back more control to the user in their automatic bidding platform – the ability to select which type of conversion drives it.

In automatic bidding you set a daily budget for your campaign, and usually a CPC (cost per click) limit for all the keywords in the campaign, but then all the bidding is done by Google, provided that the bid stays beneath your CPC max.

Historically, the bidding process has been driven by which keyword is most likely to get clicked on – that is, Google would place the higher bids on the keywords that have gotten clicked on most often, but now you can change that. You can tell AdWords to place the higher bids on keywords that have gotten a different kind of result, all without setting any bids yourself.

In bid automation, you can tell Google not to bid according to what keyword will likely get clicked on, but according to what keyword has historically resulted in a sale, or according to what keyword has resulted in some other transaction. Likewise, you can tell the program to bid accordingly to what keyword has resulted in the most mobile calls, or form completions.

So it isn’t the most popular keyword that always gets the highest bid anymore, if you so choose. This makes it so that you don’t have to spend as much time with the “nuts and bolts” of your AdWords account, and instead do other things, like run your business. Of course, I’m going to have to test this new feature out before I fully endorse it, but, assuming it works, it is a smart move by Google. Especially so considering that they just got accused of taking away user control in their last move with the close variants option. It seems that now they are giving some of the control back to the user.

Infront Webworks is a certified Google Partner, and has an AdWords-certified team of PPC experts. If you’re thinking about running AdWords campaigns for your business contact us to help you.