According to a new report, 79% of surveyed B2B businesses say they've been negatively impacted by COVID-19. That same report finds that 28% of surveyed businesses think their sales cycle will be slowed by three to six months.

How can you start boosting your sales as quickly as possible? Use smart bidding, a digital advertising tool from Google Ads. Smart bidding is a tech tool you can use to analyze millions of signals within your customer data — something you could never do single-handedly. The key advantage of using smart bidding is that you can set auction-level changes in real time and optimize your advertising campaigns.

What are its key components as laid out by the source?

Smart bidding uses advanced machine learning.

These incorporated algorithms focus and target data on a huge, encompassing scale. By providing you with the results, you can then make more accurate predictions regarding how different bid amounts might impact conversions or conversion value.

Smart bidding targets a range of identifiable traits (called contextual signals) about a person or their context at the time of a particular auction.

The following automatic bidding signal information areas provide you with the most crucial and useful data:

  • Device
  • Physical location
  • Location intent
  • Weekday and time of day
  • Remarketing list
  • Ad characteristics
  • Interface language
  • Browser
  • Operating system
  • Demographics for search and display
  • Actual search query

Soon, these ad characteristics will have data available as well:

  • Product attributes for shopping
  • Mobile app ratings
  • Price competitiveness for shopping
  • Seasonality for shopping

Smart bidding gives you easy and flexible access to performance controls.

This matters because you have the freedom to set and/or customize performance targets to fit your specific brand goals and change your options at any time depending on your overall business model or specific sales goals. You can also get granular when it comes to setting the device performance goals you want to hit (i.e., designating mobile or desktop).

Smart bidding provides transparent performance reporting.

This will give you the key tools you need to see how well your bidding performance is doing and pivot or put out fires as necessary. A big boon in this area is the inclusion of bid strategy reports, which show you how well you're doing on an ongoing basis.

You can also play with campaign drafts and test out how adjustments may improve your performance. Taking that a step further, you can use simulators for key comparison info. Want to know how well you would have done in terms of CPA targets if you'd chosen different targets? That data is at your fingertips. You can also receive alerts in case problems are detected that need quick attention.

Smart bidding can be used to evaluate your video advertising as well.

It also allows you to use broad match keywords to speed up the process of machine learning and get more immediate data results. You do need to be a little patient while you watch results unfold once you start the smart bidding process, but once the ball gets rolling, you'll begin to get an excellent analytic picture in about a week.

So why not start incorporating smart bidding into your marketing approach right now? Do a deeper dive into its specs and you'll see that, no matter what size your business is, smart bidding can maximize your potential in a powerful way!