Bidding for Sponsored Product ads is controlled at the product level where one CPC bid is set for individual SKU in your campaign.
This CPC bid applies to all placements on Target equally (search, product detail pages, and category pages) meaning you cannot input a custom bid price for any individual keyword or placement.
Target Ads are also served based on a first-price CPC bidding model. This means that the bid that applies for any given placement, is equal to the cost you pay for each click on your ad.
Optimization Types
Target Ads are served through a third-party software called Criteo. When creating a campaign in Criteo, there are three different optimization options. These options are important as they impact the CPC bid that will ultimately apply for each product.
Clicks: Maximizes click-through-rate (CTR) given your set budget. The CPC bid will remain constant for all auctions meaning bids will never be adjusted by Criteo's engine.
Conversions: Maximizes attributed conversions given your set budget. The set minimum CPC bid in your campaign will be used as a baseline bid for all auctions. Criteo will then adjust your CPC bid based on each ad's probability of achieving a purchase. There is an initial learning phase for this optimization type which typically ends after one week, depending on traffic.
Revenue: Maximizes attributed revenue based on your set budget. Similar to the Conversions setting, Criteo will use your min CPC bid as a baseline and will adjust based on predicted placement performance. The learning phase also applies to revenue optimized campaigns.
Both the Conversion and Revenue optimization settings enable users to add a minimum and maximum bid price at the campaign level. The CPC bid may be adjusted up or down but will never be reduced lower than your required minimum bid for each SKU.
At Perpetua, we have seen best performance using the Conversions optimization setting which prioritizes spend towards placements with high conversion rates. Your optimization setting can be found within Perpetua on the Line Item overview page here:
Keyword Bidding
As soon as Sponsored Product campaigns are launched, a number of keywords will be harvested automatically. These keywords are based primarily on your product title as well as your product's general category.
In addition to keywords that are auto-harvested, keywords can be added manually. For keywords that are underperforming, a negative match can be applied.
Note: The maximum number of keywords within any campaign is 200.
There is no self-serve option to add keywords for Target. Changes must be requested directly to Criteo. To request keyword additions, please reach out to your assigned Ecommerce Associate at Perpetua.