Google's bid strategy simulator
You may be familiar with Google's bid strategy simulator, showing you what the impact would be if you changed the Target ROAS or Target CPA of a bid strategy:
While this data is interesting, it won't tell you what the impact would be on your (client's) profit for each of these scenarios. First of all, because Google usually doesn't have your margin data.
Profit curves aren't linear. It's about finding that sweet spot where marginal gains outweigh marginal costs, and pushing beyond that can actually hurt more than help.
They often look like the graph below, and unless you do this exercise, you won't know where you are on this curve and what target will maximize your profit.
In the example below, changing your target ROAS from 500% to 1,000% would increase profit from $2,000 to $3,600 weekly (+80%!).
As you'll understand, one of the most impactful things you could do (for your client) is to change the target CPA or ROAS to a more profitable one based on the right data.
You can create graphs like the one above yourself by copying this Google Sheet. This sheet also contains the simple formulas we use to calculate profit in TrueClicks.
Find this insight in TrueClicks
This insight is disabled by default, as we'll need your input to activate it. To activate it, go to this part of the Google Ads account in TrueClicks.
Current interface
New interface (for beta users)
Option 1 (simple): enter the account-level average profit margin
Open the inactive check and click on the customize link at the right.
Now, you can enter the following inputs to the right:
The account average profit margin. We will treat this as a percentage, so if it's 25%, simply enter 25. We will use this margin for all ROAS or CPA-based bid strategies in this account.
Optional: variable cost per conversion. We will treat this as a currency, so if it's $5, simply enter 5. This is the cost to the advertiser that doesn't depend on revenue (like margin is) but reflects the cost of fulfilling (and shipping) each order, regardless of the revenue. For example, if you're an e-commerce advertiser that offers free shipping, your average shipping costs per order should go here.
Within a minute after saving these inputs, you'll get a table looking like this one:
For each bid strategy (portfolio or campaign-level), we'll fetch the simulator data, combine it with your inputs, and highlight if you should increase or decrease your target CPA or ROAS and what the expected profit will be.
You can expand the scenarios per bid strategy by clicking on the icon next to it (pink arrow in the screenshot above).
Option 2 (advanced): fill a Google sheet with the right profit margin per bid strategy and sync it with TrueClicks
If you use different bid strategies within an account because of different margins (e.g., different margins per product category), you'll want to use our Google Sheets sync, so you can provide us with these different margins per bid strategy.
Create a new, empty Google Sheet. Tip, go to sheets.new in your browser.
Make sure this Sheet is shared with trueclicks@trueclicks-app-sheets-access.iam.gserviceaccount.com and give this email address editor rights.
Enter the URL of this Sheet into the customize part of this insight after clicking on "Google Sheet":
After clicking on Save, TrueClicks will populate that empty sheet with all the relevant bid strategies we found in the account, once that's done, you'll see a table that looks like this:
Now, return to the sheet and enter the margin and the variable cost per conversion in the green cells. The latter is optional:
Finally, update the insight in TrueClicks, so we'll fetch the margin data you just entered in the sheet, and we'll calculate the corresponding profit-maximizing targets:
