Advocado offers several activation strategies to fit within your existing campaigns. This article will guide you through selecting an appropriate strategy.
Advocado activation strategies fall in to two categories:
- Location Activations - Advocado adds bid modifiers to location targets over your entire campaign
- Keyword Activations - Advocado manually adjusts bids 1 keyword at a time
Advocado recommends Location Activations where possible for best performance and ease of setup.
Regardless of activation strategy, Advocado only supports the following campaign bidding strategies:
- Manual CPC
- Enhanced CPC (eCPC)
- Maximize Clicks
Google does not allow adjustments to bids using any of their other "smart" bidding strategies.
Location Activation Strategies
Location activations are recommended because they dynamically respond to the geography of any detection. For example: If my ad airs in Saint Louis, only the Saint Louis DMA will be boosted rather than the entire campaign. Location Activation strategies come in 3 flavors described below.
Advocado will never lower an existing bid modifier
The location activation system has a few limitations:
Location Exclusions overrule all location modifications. Advocado will not add or remove location exclusions or negative location targets.
Radius targets will prevent Advocado activations from taking effect and are unsupported.
The account MUST have existing location targets. If the campaign is global, the scope of the campaign will be narrowed during activation. Advocado recommends adding country-level targets.
DMA Only
- When a detection occurs, Advocado adds a bid modifier to the location target for only that DMA
- Advocado will create a location target if it does not already exist on the account.
- Use this option when the account has only location targeting for DMAs or regions larger than a DMA
Any existing location targets smaller than a DMA will override adjustments made by Advocado when using this strategy.
| Before Activation |
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| After detection in St. Louis DMA |
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DMA and Sub-Locations
- When a detection occurs, Advocado adds a bid modifier to the location target for that DMA as well as any locations smaller than the DMA that were already targeted
- Advocado will create a location target for the DMA if it doesn't already exist on the account
- Use this option when the account has existing targeting and it is acceptable for targeting to be expanded during the Micro-Moment
| Before |
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| After detection in St. Louis DMA |
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Existing Locations Only
- When a detection occurs, Advocado will search for existing location targets on the account that fall within the detection DMA and will add bid adjustments to them.
- Advocado will NOT add any targets to the campaign and will only modify existing targets
- Use this option when you need strict control over location targeting
| Before |
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| After detection in St. Louis DMA |
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Keyword Activation Strategy
Keyword activations manually adjust the bids of individual keywords during the Micro-Moment. Because they impact the entire campaign, it is recommended that they only be used when detections are relevant nationwide, or when campaigns are created and configured for each DMA.
The maximum recommended number of keywords Advocado can adjust during the Micro-Moment is 2,500. Adding more keywords will slow down the activation and the Micro-Moment may be missed.
During the Micro-Moment Advocado will check the existing bids of all selected keywords as well as predicted first-page and top-of-page bids. If the keyword has a predicted bid, Advocado will raise the bid to that amount plus an additional percentage. If not, Advocado raises the bid of the keyword by a configurable amount proportional to the existing bid.
You can set a global maximum bid. Advocado will never increase a bid beyond that maximum.
Keyword activations can be useful in a few scenarios described below. If none of these apply Advocado recommends using Location Activations.
- You only want a specific set of highly TV correlated keywords boosted
- You are advertising in a single DMA and want precise control over keyword bids
- You are using radius location targets.