Portfolio bid strategies in Google Ads provide a way to group multiple campaigns, ad groups, and keywords together to optimize performance toward a single shared goal. When you manage various search campaigns, applying individual bid settings can become difficult to maintain as your account grows. These shared strategies automate the bidding process across your selected set, helping you maintain a consistent approach to your return on ad spend or cost-per-acquisition targets without needing to adjust every campaign manually.
What are portfolio bid strategies?
A portfolio bid strategy is a single, central bidding setting that you apply to multiple campaigns at once. Instead of setting a target CPA or target ROAS for each campaign individually, you create a portfolio strategy in your shared library. You then assign this strategy to any campaign that shares the same business objective. This setup is useful when you have several campaigns that all contribute to the same conversion goal, such as lead generation for a specific service line or product category. By pooling the data, the bidding algorithm gains more signals to work with, which can aid in decision-making when individual campaigns have lower volume.
In a typical account, you might have ten different search campaigns targeting similar keywords across different geographic locations. Managing bid adjustments individually for each of these would require constant monitoring and manual updates. By grouping them under a single portfolio strategy, you ensure that the algorithm treats them as a collective unit. This consistency helps prevent bidding conflicts where campaigns might otherwise compete for the same traffic while targeting different efficiency metrics. It simplifies your account structure and makes scaling easier when you launch new campaigns that belong to the same category.
When should you use portfolio strategies?
You should consider using these strategies when you have multiple campaigns that share the same performance goals. For instance, if you run three different search campaigns for a Shopify store selling home office furniture, and all three are focused on maintaining a specific ROAS, a portfolio strategy is a logical choice. It allows you to set one target for all three campaigns rather than maintaining separate targets. This is particularly helpful for businesses that have seasonal trends or varying budgets across different product lines that should nonetheless perform at a similar efficiency level.
Another scenario for using these strategies is when you have low-volume campaigns. An individual campaign might not have enough conversion data to reach its optimal performance quickly. By grouping it with other similar campaigns in a portfolio, you provide the system with more conversion data. This broader dataset allows the algorithm to learn faster and make better bidding decisions. It is a common pattern to group campaigns that represent the same stage of the buyer journey, such as all top-of-funnel awareness campaigns or all bottom-of-funnel conversion campaigns.
How to set up portfolio bid strategies
Setting up a portfolio strategy starts in the shared library of your Google Ads account. You navigate to the Tools and Settings menu, find the Shared Library section, and select Bid Strategies. From there, you can click the plus button to create a new portfolio strategy. You will be prompted to choose a strategy type, such as Target CPA or Target ROAS, and then define your specific performance target. Once created, you can apply this strategy to any existing search campaign by editing the campaign settings and selecting the portfolio option from the bidding section.
- Go to the Tools and Settings icon in the top right corner of your Google Ads dashboard.
- Select the Shared Library option and click on Bid Strategies.
- Click the plus icon to add a new strategy and select your goal type.
- Name your strategy clearly so you can identify it when applying it to campaigns.
- Assign the strategy to your chosen campaigns within their individual campaign settings.
How Alien Road applies portfolio bid strategies
At Alien Road, we use portfolio bid strategies to create consistency across client accounts. During our initial audit, we identify campaigns that share identical conversion goals and budget constraints. We then group these into a single portfolio to ensure that the bidding algorithm remains aligned with the client’s primary objective. We avoid the mistake of keeping campaigns siloed if they are intended to serve the same audience segment. This unified approach allows us to report on performance more effectively, as we can measure the success of the entire portfolio against the client’s business goals rather than just individual campaign performance.
For example, in a typical engagement for an e-commerce retailer, we often group campaigns by product categories that share similar profit margins. By applying a portfolio target ROAS to these specific groups, we can maintain the desired profitability across the entire category. We monitor the portfolio performance weekly to ensure the targets are still relevant. If a specific campaign within the portfolio underperforms, we can adjust its individual bid or exclude it from the portfolio without affecting the entire group’s learning cycle.
What are the common pitfalls to avoid?
One major mistake is setting unrealistic targets when starting a portfolio strategy. If you set a target ROAS that is significantly higher than your historical performance, the system may struggle to find enough traffic to meet that goal, leading to a drop in total impressions. It is usually better to set a target based on the recent historical average of the grouped campaigns. You can gradually increase your goal over time once the portfolio has demonstrated stable performance at the initial target level.
Another pitfall is grouping campaigns with vastly different goals or performance histories. If you combine a high-performing brand campaign with a new, unproven broad-match campaign, the portfolio strategy might struggle to balance the bidding. The algorithm works best when the campaigns in a portfolio are somewhat similar in their objectives and conversion behavior. Avoid mixing campaigns that have very different target CPAs or ROAS requirements, as this will prevent the algorithm from finding a common point of success for the entire group.
How to monitor and optimize portfolio performance
Monitoring the performance of your portfolio is similar to monitoring individual campaigns, but you should look at the aggregate data. Within the Bid Strategies section, you can view the status of each strategy, including whether it is currently active or in a learning phase. Check for any warnings about limited budget or low conversion volume, as these can impact the performance of every campaign in the portfolio. If a portfolio shows limited status, it may indicate that the target you have set is too restrictive for the available traffic.
- Review the shared library weekly to check the status of each portfolio strategy.
- Compare the actual CPA or ROAS of the portfolio against the target you set.
- Look at the individual campaign performance within the portfolio to identify outliers.
- Adjust targets in small increments to avoid triggering a new, long learning phase.
- Check that your conversion tracking is consistent across all campaigns in the portfolio.
When should you adjust your portfolio targets?
You should consider adjusting your targets when there is a clear shift in your business objectives or market conditions. For instance, if your business decides to prioritize market share over immediate ROAS, you might lower your target ROAS to allow the system to bid more aggressively. Conversely, if you need to improve profitability, you can tighten your target. Always wait for the portfolio to complete its learning phase before making further adjustments, which usually takes about one to two weeks depending on the volume of conversions.
Avoid changing targets too frequently or by large margins. Large, sudden changes can force the algorithm to restart its learning process, leading to temporary performance instability. If you must make a significant change, do it in small steps over several weeks. This allows the system to adapt gradually and helps maintain a more stable performance trend. Keep a log of when you make changes to your portfolio targets so you can correlate them with any observed shifts in your campaign performance metrics.
Where to start this week
Start your work this week by identifying three campaigns that share a common conversion goal. Go to your Shared Library and create a new portfolio bid strategy that matches your target performance for these campaigns. Once the strategy is active, apply it to those three campaigns. Monitor the performance for the next seven days to observe how the campaigns react to the shared bidding logic. If you see stable results, consider adding more related campaigns to the same portfolio to further consolidate your account management.
Ensure that your conversion tracking is properly configured before you start. Portfolio strategies rely heavily on accurate data to make informed bidding decisions. If your conversion data is missing or incorrectly counted, the strategy will not function as intended. Verify your tags, conversion actions, and attribution settings to confirm everything is accurate. By establishing a solid foundation, you ensure that the automated bidding system has the right signals to work with, which is essential for achieving your desired performance outcomes.
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