If you’ve set up a new bid strategy in SA360 recently, you may have been surprised to find two recently added options: Multiple Target ROAS and Multiple Target CPA. The Multi-Target Portfolio may have appeared without much notice, and so for many users gaining clarity is essential. Below, we help to demystify SA360’s newest bid strategy: what it is, what it is not, and how it might help you.
What are Multi-Target Portfolios?
Multi-Target Portfolios (or MTPs for short) differ in composition from your usual Target CPA or ROAS. Rather than being made up of a number of campaigns, they are made up of a number of sub-portfolios. These can be existing portfolio bid strategies that are moved into an MTP, or new portfolios that are created during the MTP setup.
What Happens to Existing Bid Strategies if Added to an MTP?
In practice, very little changes. Each portfolio that you add to an MTP, thus becoming a sub-portfolio, retains its existing efficiency target as well as any historical performance data. You are still able to adjust the ROAS or CPA target of each sub-portfolio independently, and there is no target that can be set at the umbrella level; no option exists to give the MTP as a whole a target to aim for.
If No Efficiency Targets Change, and an Overall MTP Target Can’t Be Set, What’s the Point of Setting One Up at All?
This is a fair question. We have found that there are two main benefits to consolidating your bid strategies into what we’ll call an MTP structure. The first becomes obvious as soon as you set your first MTP up; the structure makes management significantly easier. We work with some businesses who have dozens of active bid strategies in their account, and while managing them in bulk is possible, it can be a headache to navigate and often leads to mistakes or missed opportunities. Consolidating your bid strategies into MTPs grouped by location, conversion goal, or campaign type (what makes sense for you will depend entirely on your account structure) makes management and in-platform reporting clearer and more efficient.
A view demonstrating the consolidated view that MTPs provide; here, 27 bid strategies are grouped into five clear, digestible rows of performance data.
Secondly, we have found that MTP structures can drive a performance benefit, particularly for those portfolio bid strategies that struggle with low conversion volumes. It is widely understood that the more conversions a bid strategy can generate, the more effectively it can optimize; this is why there are recommended minimum conversion data thresholds when creating a bid strategy. When grouped in an MTP, this conversion volume burden is effectively inherited by the umbrella level rather than applying to each individual sub-portfolio. There are, in fact, additional cross-learnings between bid strategies in the same MTP. This has led, in a number of cases, to meaningful performance improvements in poorly converting bid strategies when added to an MTP with much stronger ones. So, if you’re looking to strengthen some of your portfolios, an MTP structure could be worth considering.
Are There Any Other Best Practices to Be Aware Of?
You might notice that one of the available settings when setting up your MTP is ‘Set additional ROAS/CPA constraints’. This drop-down enables you to provide a highest and lowest acceptable efficiency target for the MTP to strive to stay within. While this may seem a tempting opportunity to control ROI by constraining the bidder, these should only be set in certain circumstances. This option is designed specifically for advertisers expecting significant volatility. It informs the tool that ROAS (for example) is likely to stray beyond what the system might estimate is acceptable. This threshold is approximately 30% above or below whatever target you have set. If historical performance is more stable than that, you do not need to set constraints.
So How Can You Share This in a Succinct Way With Your Team?
There are practical steps you can implement; we unpack these below.
- MTPs are a new feature that allow you to group multiple portfolio bid strategies of the same type (target CPA or target ROAS)
- Efficiency targets are still managed at portfolio level
- They’re useful for simplifying your bid strategy reporting, or improving the performance of some of your smaller bid strategies
- Target constraint settings exist, but in most cases we’d recommend you don’t set them
If you’re still unsure if the feature is worth a test, or if you have any questions about Multi-Target Portfolios that haven’t been answered here, please get in touch. Our team would be happy to help at searchadtechuk@incubeta.com .
Written by Will Haynes, Search Associate, UK, Incubeta.
