Your Guide to Meta Bid Strategies
Introduction
This guide highlights the bid strategies available to you on Meta Ads. After reading this guide, you'll be able to consider the benefits and tradeoffs for each bid strategy, and better understand how bid strategies impact your overall campaign performance.
Why Your Bid Strategy Matters
Meta’s bid strategies help you get the measurable business outcomes you care about, such as increasing total sales, getting more customers, or increasing brand reach. Depending on the outcome you want from your campaign, it’s important to choose a bid strategy that best matches your primary KPI, or how you’ll measure success. Doing so can maximize your campaign’s efficiency, increase your advertising ROI, and ultimately increase profitability.
To evaluate which strategy can work best for your campaign, you’ll need to first identify your overall Meta objective and your primary KPI.
For example: A pet shop supplier wants to increase online sales, so they decide to use Meta to drive purchases, their primary objective. If they want to focus on keeping marketing costs low, their primary KPI could be cost per purchase. If they want to focus on maximizing the purchase value of their purchases, their primary KPI could be return-on-ad-spend. Whichever KPI they decide to focus on determines the bid strategy they should choose.
Cost vs. Control
In our system it is important to remember that the more control you maintain over costs, the more constraints you place on our platform to find lower cost opportunities for your desired outcomes.
A bid represents what you're willing to pay to achieve your desired result from someone in your target audience. However, your bid is the not the cost of your chosen optimization event. If you want to directly control for the cost of an outcome, then use cost cap.
How Bid Strategy Impacts Your Costs
Choosing the Right Bid Strategy
Note: Bid strategy availability may depend on your selected campaign objective
Performance goal | Available bid strategies | Best for... | Watch out for... |
|---|---|---|---|
Maximize number of results for your budget | Automated bidding | Getting the most volume of results possible and do not have strict CPA needs Spending your full budget is a high priority Advertisers who may not have a clear goal/KPI in mind | Higher costs (e.g. CPM, CPA) than what you might tolerate |
Maximize conversion value | Highest value (uses automated bidding) | Spending your budget while focusing on higher value purchases | Requires a good distribution of values across different products Requires pixel to pass back purchase values |
Control the cost of your results | Cost cap | Keeping CPA at or below a certain amount regardless of market conditions | Spend may be slower than when using lowest cost; if you do not have strict CPA goals and care more about spending your budget, try lowest cost. Learning phase may take longer to exit than other bid strategies, during which costs may exceed your cap; however, delivery should stabilize after exiting learning. If you typically observe conversions over a much longer window than 7 days post-click, you may observe stronger fluctuation in spend and CPA, but performance should stabilize over time |
Control your return on ad spend (ROAS) | Minimum ROAS | Breaking even on your ad spend and reaching a certain return More control over the purchase value you generate from ads than highest value bidding | If Meta cannot reach your ROAS floor, then delivery may stop; does not aim to deliver your budget in full If you care more about spend than generating a specific ROAS, consider using highest value bidding Requires pixel to pass back purchase values Requires ability to calculate bids based on projected conversion rates and marginal cost |
[Advanced] Manually cap how much Meta bids in auctions | Bid cap | Advertisers who use internal bidding or LTV models Controlling how much Meta can bid in auctions | Does not control for the CPA you see in reporting and requires more frequent bid changes Requires ability to calculate bids based on projected conversion rates and marginal cost |
