TCPA (Target Cost Per Acquisition) and tROAS (Target Return On Ad Spend), the two oldest auto bidding strategies are moving on. In a blog post Google announced that in April, Google will be retiring tCPA and tROAS, as options for picking a bidding strategy in campaign settings. Just like other transitions, Google has completed over the last year, this change will be gradual.
TCPA and tROAS Explained
Just to get an understanding of what you will be missing out on, let’s go over what tCPA and tROAS used to be. These automated bidding strategies used machine learning to create the best optimization for bids based on your goal. In layman’s terms, Google takes your budget and bids whatever you need to bid to get the most conversions with the cheapest cost or highest return percentage. The goal of each is to maximize your results.
These automated bidding strategies were the best way to get the most bang for your advertising spending. If you are an eCommerce company and have revenue tracking set up and you focus heavily on ROI, it would be the most preferred method.
Monitoring
Being able to pick a specific target also means you need to check up and adjust your target tCPA or tROAS for it to align with the campaign's current performance metrics. In a perfect world, you would want a $1.00 CPA or a ROAS of 900%. However, if your target CPA or ROAS isn’t based in reality, Google will have a hard time figuring out how to reach your goal of $1.00. This makes the target goal finicky to reach, meaning you will need to change your goals.
Historical Data
Historical data is something you need in vast amounts to obtain the conversion data you need for these campaigns to get maximum results. If you are just starting an account with no history or data it doesn’t make sense to use these campaign strategies.. This is because Google uses machine learning and without any data to learn from, Google will struggle to hit your target.
Alternatives for tCPA and tROAS
As mentioned before, the changes to tCPA and tROAS will be gradually changed over several months. The main change is that max conversions are going to have the CPA target setting underneath it, similar to how Google already does with tCPA. As well as, max conversion value will have an option underneath to obtain ROAS just as tROAs currently do.
Is There Anything to Worry About for My tROAS or tCPA Campaigns
According to Google, no action is necessary. As we have discussed here before, these campaign types are being retired and reorganized. Due to this your campaigns will be transitioned to Max Conversions or Max Conversion Value, so there is no need to worry and you can continue your campaigns as usual. This transition should be quite smooth and you shouldn't see a change in your setup data or performance.
As we all know Google has been making numerous changes to Google Ads. These changes have helped optimize Google Ads but being able to learn about these changes beforehand will help you ensure your continued success. It is your choice to change your campaigns right away or to let Google slowly transition them. But whatever route you decide, you should be able to stay on top of it and evaluate your campaigns. Just make sure to do a quick audit on a campaign level for settings and metrics to help you identify what parts of your account might be impacted.