What is Google ads Bid Simulator and how to Use it?

It is possible to use two types of these simulators:

Simulators collect search and network advertising data from ad auctions. In ad auctions, they collect information such as Quality Score, keyword traffic, or competition.

They show you an overview of how bids can affect the performance of your campaigns in 7 days.

What bid simulations can be used?

They show the change in your ad’s maximum cost-per-click (CPC) bid. This price affects the number of clicks, the conversion value, and the number of impressions your ads would receive.

This simulator shows how bid changes in your campaign can change that campaign’s performance.

The Shopping Campaign Simulator shows how your bid changes can change the performance of your ad for a particular product.

It’s used to show how your maximum CVP changes and how it could change the performance of your video campaigns over the course of a week.

Shows how your campaign maximum CPC and percentage of maximum CPC or commission as a percentage (%) change.

Shows how your campaign performance can change on the different devices users use.

It shows us that changing the bid could affect the performance of the call interaction.

An example from practice where we set a max CPC of € 0.10 for a particular keyword. However, we are interested in what results we could achieve with an offer of € 0.05. The simulator can generate estimates for the number of clicks, cost, impressions, and conversions we would achieve for a particular keyword at a maximum CPC of $ 0.05.

The bid simulators are a unique way to see predicted changes in the performance of your ads as you apply changes your settings. Until recently, they were only available for manual bidding and target CPA. Now you can use them with Smart Bidding too.

Different settings have different impacts on your ad performance, and those are usually difficult to predict. Since risk does not always result in profit, Google has developed a great tool to help you set up your campaigns and bids – bid simulators. Those will help you understand more about what happens if you change your ad’s target values ​​or budget.

Ad performance is influenced by a number of factors, and simulators are responsible for taking them into account when predicting your ad performance after a change in the setting. Therefore, they take into consideration things like landing page, competitor ads, their bids, and so on. As a result, they’ll show you how the performance of your ad is esteemed to change after applying new settings, if the current factors have the same value/quality.

There are several types of smart bidding simulators, depending on the metric you track:

1. Conversions

If conversions are your key metric, you can use simulators at different levels when using target CPA or maximize conversions strategies. While target CPA is available for search, display, and app campaigns, the maximize conversions simulator is only available for the Search Network.

2. Conversion value

In case your conversion value is important to you and you’re using a target ROAS strategy, you can use the simulator on all levels. Simulators are available for conversion values ​​for Search and Shopping ads

3. Click

If you focus on clicks, you can use the maximize clicks strategy. This strategy simulator only works to maximize search clicks.

Where to find bid simulators?

Simulators are indicated in each category by their icon. You can find them in the appropriate categories of your Google Ads account, depending on the level on which you want to track the changes – for your ad group, campaign, or portfolio bid strategy. In the first case, select the Ad groups section and select either “Target CPA” or “Target ROAS” to find the icon. For a campaign, click the Campaign section and find the icon in the budget column. Finally, for portfolio bid strategies, click the wrench icon in the top bar and select Bid Strategies in the Shared Library section. Click your preferred campaign target to find the simulator icon.