As competition in the digital marketing world increases day by day, going beyond standard solutions and managing campaigns with maximum efficiency is of critical importance for advertisers. Google's powerful programmatic advertising platform Display & Video 360 (DV360) responds to this need with its advanced features. One of these features, Custom Bidding, provides advertisers with unique control over their bidding strategies, allowing them to optimize their campaigns according to their specific business goals. As Whi, we detail in this article what DV360 Custom Bidding is, what strategic advantages it will bring to your brand, and how you can effectively use this powerful feature.
What is Custom Bidding? How Does It Differ from Standard Bidding Strategies?
Display & Video 360 offers various automatic bidding strategies (e.g., Target CPM, Maximize Impressions, etc.). While these strategies are effective in many scenarios, each business has its own unique KPIs, customer segments, and profitability goals. This is where Custom Bidding comes into play.
Custom Bidding is an advanced feature in the DV360 platform that allows advertisers to go beyond standard algorithms and create bidding logic based on their own defined signals and custom algorithms. Simply put, it allows you to define special rules that ensure every penny of your advertising budget is spent on the impressions and users that are most valuable to you.
This means you can directly integrate specific business information such as "this user segment is more valuable to me" or "conversions in this product category have higher profitability" into your bidding algorithm.
What Strategic Advantages Will Custom Bidding Provide to Your Brand?
Using Custom Bidding provides a range of important benefits to your digital advertising strategy:
- Business-Specific KPI Optimization: Beyond standard platform metrics, you can optimize according to metrics that truly matter to your business (e.g., customer lifetime value (LTV), profit margin, users with high probability of completing a specific action, etc.).
- Leveraging the Power of First-Party Data: By including data from your CRM systems, your users' past purchasing behaviors, or special interactions on your website in your bidding model, you can make your targeting and bids much more accurate.
- Maximum Flexibility and Granular Control: You have complete control over your bidding logic. You decide how much weight each signal will carry, allowing you to dynamically adapt your strategy to real-time market conditions and your changing goals.
- Increased Return on Ad Spend (ROAS): By intelligently directing your budget to impressions with the highest conversion probability and value, you can maximize the revenue you get from your advertising spend.
- Competitive Advantage: You can get a step ahead in the market by developing bidding strategies based on special signals and business information that your competitors cannot use or are not aware of.
How Does Custom Bidding Work?
The basic working principle of Custom Bidding is based on the advertiser providing a bidding model (algorithm) to DV360. This model is usually defined through a Python or JavaScript-based script.
The process generally works as follows:
1. Signal Collection: During each ad auction, DV360 collects hundreds of signals related to the user (anonymized), content, time, geographic location, and publisher.
2. Data Integration: The advertiser uploads their first-party data (e.g., product profitability, customer segment information) to DV360.
3. Custom Algorithm Activation: Your defined Custom Bidding script analyzes real-time signals from DV360 and the data you've uploaded.
4. Impression Valuation and Bid Adjustment: Your algorithm calculates how "valuable" each potential impression is for your business (assigns a score or probability) and determines how much DV360 should bid for that impression based on this value.
In this way, each bid is shaped in real-time according to your unique business goals and data insights.
When Should You Use Custom Bidding Strategies?
Custom Bidding may not always be the most suitable solution for every advertiser. However, it would be beneficial to consider this advanced feature in the following situations:
- If standard automatic bidding strategies don't fully meet your business's complex and specific goals.
- If you want to assign different monetary values to different types of conversions (e.g., email subscription vs. high-value purchase) and optimize accordingly.
- If including long-term metrics such as Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) in your bidding strategies is critical.
- If you want to create sophisticated bidding logic based on advanced segmentations and first-party data.
- If you're seeking more granular control and optimization over your advertising budget.
Conclusion: Mastery Level in Advertising
The Custom Bidding feature in Display & Video 360 offers advertisers unprecedented control and flexibility over their bidding strategies. When properly configured and effectively managed, it is a powerful ally in achieving your brand's specific goals and getting maximum value from your advertising spend. However, this is not a "set and forget" feature; it requires strategic planning, quality data, technical expertise, and continuous optimization. When used with the right approach, it can create a real competitive advantage for your brand. With this advanced optimization capability, taking control in digital advertising and reaching your goals is now more possible than ever.
