Google Announces Journey Aware Bidding Beta

The days of finding workarounds to let the Google bidding algorithm know there’s more to the lead journey than just a form fill might be behind us. Google has announced a new bidding beta called Journey Aware Bidding, which takes into account the whole lead journey.

Search campaigns using a Target CPA bid strategy will factor both biddable and non-biddable conversion actions as signals to identify potential high-quality leads. This means that while a campaign will still optimize toward a primary goal, such as a form fill, the AI-powered algorithm can also use other conversion actions in the account (i.e. newsletter sign-ups) as additional signals, even if the campaign isn’t explicitly optimizing toward them.

This should be helpful for campaigns that struggle with low conversion volume due to the nature of long sales cycles. It can also eliminate the need of optimizing towards “soft conversions” for the sake of getting more data but can potentially skew performance. The beta also aligns with the broader trend of ad platforms using everything we give it as a potential signal to feed bidding algorithms.