Autobidding, Auctions, and Automatic Growth
In the world of digital advertising, keeping campaigns efficient, reaching the right people, and ensuring money is well-spent are ongoing challenges. As the online market grows more complex and competitive, manual bidding strategies have become labor-intensive, less effective, and error-prone. Originally, ad bidding was straightforward, but it has evolved to include myriad variables—like time of day, geographic location, and keywords—that differ across advertising platforms.
In response to this complexity, some major advertisers have built teams of data scientists, while others have outsourced their bidding strategies to specialized firms. Many smaller advertisers, feeling outmatched, scale back their efforts or focus on only a couple of platforms.
However, recent advancements in machine learning and artificial intelligence have led to the development of autobidding—a system that simplifies bidding by using AI to automate and optimize ad placements.
How Autobidding is Revolutionizing Advertising?
Autobidding allows advertisers to specify just a few of their high-level objectives and constraints (e.g., which products they want to promote and what their daily budget is), and the platforms’ internal bidding bots will do the rest, optimally determining an appropriate bid for each opportunity to show an ad to a user, and dynamically adjusting these bids in response to changes in the bidding environment.
Internally, these bidding bots can be very complex, utilizing large data sets and relying on a variety of ML/AI algorithms to optimize the performance of ad campaigns - but crucially, this complexity is hidden from the human bidders, who can enjoy a natural and intuitive user interface, and simply observe the fruits of the optimization.
Sounds a little technical? Well, in the words of the British science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” And this is exactly what a well-designed and properly implemented autobidding system does for its users - it magically gives them strong results from advertising campaigns, without having to spend enormous amounts of time or resources on managing them.
Key Benefits of Autobidding Systems
By using auto bidding services, advertisers can unlock the efficiency and potential of their campaigns, and achieve their goals faster and easier. Key benefits are:
- Efficiency: Autobidding saves time and effort by automating bid adjustments, reducing the risk of spending too much or too little.
- Performance: It optimizes ad spending by calculating the best bid for each scenario, using both past data and predictive analytics.
- Flexibility: It adjusts to market dynamics and can manage multiple objectives and campaigns with various bidding strategies.
How the Big Tech is doing it…
Big tech companies have championed autobidding, with Google Ads Smart Bidding being a prime example. This system offers several strategies tailored to different campaign goals, leveraging real-time data like device type and location to customize bids. According to Google, over 70% of their advertisers have adopted autobidding.
Pinterest reports that 80% of its pay-per-click revenue is generated through automated campaigns. Similarly, Facebook’s Automated App Ads allow developers to promote apps effortlessly across Facebook’s network by optimizing the ads’ creative and targeting elements.
Despite the success, it took these platforms many years of trial and error and a lot of engineering resources to perfect these products.
A Game-Changing Approach by Topsort
At Topsort, we believe engaging in ad auctions should be straightforward. Brands shouldn't have to undergo extensive training to promote their products. That's why our ad server was designed with autobidding at its core—so brands can access the powerful technology that has driven immense advertising profits for companies like Google for years.
To discover more about how Topsort's autobidding can revolutionize your ad business, click here.
