Is Automated Bidding Killing Manual Bidding?

Updated March 3, 2025

Automatic for the People

Automation is creeping slowly into most aspects of our lives. From self driving cars to turning the lights on when you walk into a room, small processes are being automated all the time. Online marketing is probably ahead of much of the world in this regard, with automation having been in fashion for a while now, with products like Marketo leading the way.

But typically this automation tends to be focused on simple processes that only really cost time. When it comes to spending money, people are less keen to trust automation to do their job for them. Which is probably why many people have tried to resist automated bidding on platforms like AdWords so far.

Why Pay a Dog and Bark Yourself?

AdWords has grown in sophistication since its launch in 2000 and is gaining new features on an almost monthly basis. One of the features that has received a great deal of attention from Google is their automated

bidding. Currently there are seven different automatic bid strategies that you can choose to run on your account. However many users choose not to use the automated options, preferring to manually adjust their bids.

The reason why is logical. Marketing has long been an industry of hunches, judgement calls and educated guesses. The rise of the marketing scientist is only recent and many marketers are still hanging on to the old way of thinking, preferring to hold on to their own purse strings.

Don’t Bother With DIY When the Experts Can Do it

However, as we’re all aware by now, Google is collecting information on us all the time. Every search we make or email we open in Google’s ecosystem is tracked and attributed to us. All of this information in turn filters into their tools like AdWords, allowing Google’s automated bidding systems access to far more information than any human could ever understand.

As machine learning has advanced Google have now become so confident in their automated bidding that “Maximize for conversions” is the default setting when creating a new campaign in AdWords.

The more information you feed into machine learning, the cleverer it can get. So Google are in a great position to develop great automated bidding software and it seems that they have confidence in what it does. So why not give it a try?

Ad Suggestions – Google Becoming Your Copywriter

Another area where Google has put more faith in it’s AI is in writing the advertisements themselves. Ad Suggestions is the new name for an automatically created ad variation that Google will add to your AdGroups if it thinks it can get some traction. So if for example, a headline for your ad is “Best SEO Agency in Town”, Google may test a variation that says “Best Search Engine Optimization in Town”.

This feature will be rolled out on selected accounts first, and for those that don’t like the idea of Google having creative license over what they advertise, Google will allow you to turn the feature off. But, showing how confident Google is of this new tool, it will be turned on by default.

Automated Bidding for Automated People

We’d love to hear your experiences with automated bidding? Have you seen great results, or do you think manual bid adjustments are the safe way to go?