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Up level your bidding practice with Enhanced Manual Bidding

Businesses across the world are undergoing digital transformation and advertising is no exception. We see advertisers increasingly embracing automation to meet their business goals, a trend accelerated greatly by the world situation. Microsoft Advertising’s Automated Bidding solutions are a great way to drive campaigns towards your performance goals, providing the ability to dynamically set bids at auction time based on the targets you set. Automated Bidding strategies have seen tremendous growth over the last year, driven by strong advertiser ROI gains and the ability to remain responsive to a dynamic marketplace led by varied consumer and competitor behaviors. Infusing automation into your bidding practice is proven to help you adjust swiftly, optimize your time to focus on high-impact projects, and ultimately work smarter to drive optimal results.

To help you take advantage of this technology, starting this spring, all your manual bidding strategies will be optimized by Enhanced CPC (eCPC). Enhanced CPC will become the bid strategy for all search, shopping, and Dynamic Search Ads campaigns not yet opted into Automated Bidding.

Benefits of Enhanced Manual Bidding

  • Elevate your bidding practice: The base bids you continue to skillfully set will always be honored as the primary lever in the eCPC bidding strategy. Those bids will get optimized at auction time to maximize performance toward your business goals.
  • Future-proof with real-time responsiveness: Use real-time and other rich auction signals such as operating system, browser, bid modifiers, search queries, and more to stay on top of the dynamic marketplace.
  • Use flexibility to select tailored strategies: eCPC can work well toward any performance goal or you can choose from other specific strategies, such as Maximize Clicks, Maximize Conversions, Target CPA (cost per acquisition) or Target ROAS (return on ad spend).

Things to know about Enhanced CPC

  • Advertisers using eCPC achieve 5-10% more conversions while maintaining their cost per acquisition (CPA).
  • With eCPC, your average cost per click (CPC) won’t exceed the maximum bid you set.
  • Some advertisers have used eCPC with technology provider bid strategies to achieve a +20% conversion rate (CVR) and -20% CPA due to the power of auction-time adjustments.
  • eCPC benefits search partner performance by optimizing for high-quality clicks.

Increase sales and efficiencies by combining eCPC with other Microsoft Advertising solutions

See how Air France reduced its CPCs by 26% and increased sales by 43% in one year with the powerful duo of eCPC and Remarketing.

 

Enhanced CPC optimizations ensure we maximize airline ticket sales on Microsoft Advertising campaigns. But when combined with Remarketing, we increase the search signals considered by Enhanced CPC algorithms, allowing for greater conversion volumes and profitability.

— Samira Jellabi, search engine advertising division director, Performics

Migration timeline

Starting in March 2021 and continuing through April 2021, all existing search, shopping, and Dynamic Search Ads campaigns without any automated bidding strategies in place will be automatically migrated to Enhanced CPC. All ad groups and keywords will also be set to inherit bidding from their parent campaign.

To make this migration seamless, starting on April 5, 2021, any new campaigns created will no longer have the option of Manual CPC. By April 30, 2021 any campaigns not yet using eCPC will be automatically migrated.

Planning ahead

To ensure that your campaigns are best set up to align with your performance goals, we recommend setting up tests to identify and/or validate your optimal automated bidding setup, which may include but is not limited to Enhanced CPC. For search campaigns, we recommend using Campaign Experiments to validate performance.

If you're still deciding which automated bidding strategy is right for you, this decision tree can help you get started: 
A graphic decision tree  to help users decide which automated bidding strategy is best for their business.

In the coming months, we'll also be releasing portfolio support for bid strategies, which will help to optimize bids across multiple campaigns.

Help us improve Microsoft Advertising

Your comments and feedback are integral to our ongoing efforts to shape and improve our product. For any questions or feedback, please reach out to your Microsoft Advertising account manager, or send us an email at advertising-feedback@microsoft.com. You can also interact with us on Twitter or suggest a feature on Microsoft Advertising Feature Suggestions.