Smart Bidding

Smart Bidding is Google Ads' automated, auction-time bidding: instead of you setting keyword bids, the system sets a bid for each individual auction using machine learning over your conversion data and contextual signals. The strategy family: Target CPA (tCPA, hit an average cost per conversion), Target ROAS (tROAS, hit an average return on ad spend), Maximize conversions, and Maximize conversion value.

#It optimizes toward whatever arrives

Smart Bidding doesn't know what your conversions should be; it optimizes toward the conversion feed you supply. Its bids are therefore only as good as that feed: conversion counts and their values, arrival lag (late CRM imports mean bids on stale truth), dedup state, and consent-modeled estimates filling observed gaps. tCPA and tROAS run the same way with different objectives: tCPA needs only trustworthy counts; tROAS additionally needs real per-conversion values, which is what makes it a value-based strategy. A misbehaving strategy is diagnosed at its inputs first.

In practice: the inputs inventory is what Buron health-checks (coverage, values, lag, dedup), because that's where "Smart Bidding isn't working" almost always lives.

What Smart Bidding actually runs on, input by input, is the full page: Smart Bidding is a signals problem: what the algorithm actually runs on. The values contract behind tROAS is Value-based bidding, the fitness of the feed itself is Signal quality, and the territory routes from conversion tracking.