What is Smart Bid?

Smart Bid is a semi-automatic campaign bidding strategy that utilizes historic data to bid on impressions that will most-likely lead to conversions for your campaigns. Bid optimizations are made in order to maximize the conversions included in your "Total Conversion Value". 

Built with deep learning, Smart Bid starts from your campaign’s baseline bid, increasing your bid on high-value impressions while reducing bids on impressions that are less likely to lead to conversion. Smart Bid ensures that you are bidding the lowest amount required to win any impression by reducing all winning bids to match the second highest bid (second price auction). You may see an example of how Smart Bid makes modifications here. 

At any time you may modify your baseline bid per individual site to optimize for performance. Learn more here. 

Benefits of Smart Bid:

1. Leverage network learnings: Smart Bid operates according to historic performance data of your campaigns. The deep learning algorithm takes into account historical campaign performance of similar campaigns - along with user data and context - and then produces a CPC bid based on the likelihood to convert.
2. Incremental scale: With the ability to run optimized bids across all 20,000+ sites on Taboola’s network, Smart Bid increases your campaign reach exponentially - with less risk.
3. Conversion-based learning: Smart Bid maintains competitive bids on the publishers and audiences that are most likely to drive conversions for your marketing objectives. Through automatic bid adjustments, Smart Bid prioritizes higher conversion rates, at scale. 
4. Continuous monitoring: Automatically cap or block publishers in the cases where we see a publisher is not the right fit for your campaign and is unable to generate conversions at a comparable CPA over a long time period.
5. Reliable optimizations: Smart Bid continuously runs back-end A/B tests to validate a user’s likelihood to convert. Smart Bid will only alter your baseline bid when it outperforms the results of fixed bidding.
6. Efficient bidding: Smart Bid reduces winning CPC bids to match the second highest bid of that auction. This ensures all Smart Bid’s recommendations meet the market rate for that impression.

New Campaigns and Ads

Smart Bid helps you successfully launch new campaigns and ads. Through semi-autonomous bid modifications, Smart Bid will alter your baseline bid through Learning, Expedited Learning, and Scaling.

Throughout Expedited Learning, your Campaign Bid may be increased in order to win the best impressions and clicks to accurately estimate CTR, but SmartBid will continue to manage bids to ensure they are the lowest required to secure the impression during the learning process. Learn more about Expedited Learning here. 

During all other Smart Bid phases your campaign bid will increase or decrease in relationship with the opportunity of a given impression. Learn about all ad and campaign statuses here.

How to Implement Smart Bid

You may update your Bid Strategy from multiple fields. The following instructions indicate how to opt into Smart Bid when setting up a new campaign.

1. Create a new Campaign
2. Go to the Bidding and Budget section
3. Under Bid Strategy, toggle Smart Bid.