Smart Bidding

Smart Bidding is a group of automatic strategies in Google Ads and Yandex Direct, where the algorithm itself assigns a bid for each auction in real time, focusing on a given KPI: target CPA, target ROAS or conversion maximization. Google calls it Smart Bidding, Yandex calls it “autostrategies”.

The main condition for Smart Bidding to work is a sufficient volume of conversions. Threshold below which the algorithm does not learn: ~50 conversions in 30 days at the campaign level. If there are fewer conversions, the strategy is “walking”, rates are jumping chaotically, CPL is growing. In my practice, for small budgets (up to 80,000 ₽/month), I often leave manual bid management and only then switch to Smart Bidding when data accumulates.

Typical mistakes when launching Smart Bidding: too aggressive target CPA from day one (the algorithm needs a “training” phase of 2-3 weeks), switching strategies more than once a week (each reset is a new training cycle), mixing micro-conversions and macro-conversions in one goal.

In 2025–2026, the Russian market almost completely switched to auto strategies in Direct - manual bid management remained the province of specific niches with rare conversions. For such cases, I use a hybrid scheme: an auto strategy with a limited daily budget and a hard cap on CPA.