Automated bidding means letting the ad platform set your bid for each auction instead of setting bids yourself. You choose a goal, such as getting as many conversions as possible within budget or a target return on spend, and the platform’s algorithms decide how much to bid each time your ad is eligible to show.
How automated bidding works
Every time someone searches or scrolls, an auction runs. With automated bidding, the platform predicts how likely that particular impression is to produce the result you want, using signals such as the search term, device, location, time of day, the person’s recent activity and how similar users behaved. It then bids more where the predicted value is high and less, or not at all, where it is low. A person managing bids by hand cannot work at that level, because they never see individual auctions.
In Google Ads, the main strategies are:
- Maximise conversions With an optional target CPA to aim for an average cost per conversion.
- Maximise conversion value With an optional target ROAS to aim for a return on ad spend.
- Maximise clicks and target impression share, which automate bids towards traffic or visibility rather than results.
The first two belong to Google’s Smart Bidding family, which optimises towards conversions. Meta offers equivalents under its bid strategies: highest volume, a cost per result goal, a ROAS goal and a bid cap. Microsoft Advertising has similar options to Google.
After launch or a significant change, a strategy enters a learning period while it gathers data. Performance often swings during this time, so judging it in the first few days usually leads to the wrong conclusion.
Why it matters
At the time of writing (October 2026), automated bidding is the default in most campaign types, and some, such as Performance Max, do not offer manual bidding at all. For most UK advertisers the question is no longer whether to use it, but how to give it the right goal and the right data.
The algorithm optimises exactly what you tell it to. If your conversion tracking counts every brochure download as equal to a signed contract, the system will find you cheap brochure downloads. If it counts the same enquiry twice, it will think a campaign is twice as good as it is. Automated bidding magnifies the quality of your tracking, good or bad, which is why I would always fix measurement before changing strategy.
Common mistakes
- Switching on a conversion-based strategy with broken or duplicated conversion tracking.
- Making micro-actions such as page views or button clicks primary conversions, so the system chases them instead of enquiries or sales.
- Setting a target CPA far below what the account has ever achieved, which starves the campaign of impressions.
- Changing targets or budgets every few days, so the strategy never leaves the learning period.
- Splitting a small budget across many campaigns, none of which has enough conversions to learn from.
- Never sending back which leads became customers, so the system cannot tell a good lead from a time-waster.
How to act on it
Start by auditing conversion tracking: one primary action per real business outcome, no duplicates, and values attached where outcomes differ in worth. For lead generation, import offline outcomes from your CRM so the platform learns which enquiries turn into business; enhanced conversions for leads is Google’s usual route for this.
Choose the strategy that matches your stage. New accounts with few conversions often start with maximise conversions and no target, then add a realistic target once there is a steady history. Shops with reliable revenue data usually move to value-based strategies. Move targets gradually rather than in large jumps, wait at least a full conversion cycle before judging, and use Google’s seasonality adjustments and data exclusions for short sales events or tracking outages rather than changing targets.
Choosing and supervising bid strategies is a large part of the work in PPC management, alongside the tracking that makes them worth trusting.