YouTube tCPA bids are more "elastic" then you think

We had a tough time in August with one of our clients. They were complaining that their conversion on our leads had TANKED 🥶.

I knew that this was partly about seasonality, as the client was in life insurance space, and August is almost the worst month outside of December and the Holiday season.

So I didn't fret too much on the quality side, but the other thing I was noticing is that our spend to budget ration (the % of our daily budget being spent) was dropping every couple of days as well.

e.g. budget is $1000 a day and it was spending $900, then $750 then $500 down to eventually only about 1/3rd of the daily budget was getting spent.

This is usually an indication that our bids are not aggressive enough to get in front of the folks we want, so there are only two choices when this happens.

Bump our tCPA bid or switch to max conversions
Change our targeting or audience to access lower cost traffic so our current bid would get in front of them

We decided to do both things.

We cloned our original campaign that was doing well and switched from the mixed audiences we were targeting to completely broad (narrowed only by age).

For this broad campaign we kept tCPA the same.

We also created a new tCPA campaign targeting the best audiences we've used over the past 90 days (mix of custom segments based on keywords, affinity audiences, in market audiences and a lookalike of 5% to Google Engaged users).

For that campaign I set the tCPA bid to almost 1.8x more (which was also what google suggested my tCPA bid be).

I figured, OK this is gonna blow things out of the water.

I set the budget to be 10X that tCPA bid and let em rip.

RESULTS 🥁...

CPA's came back to where we needed them to be in about 3 days (see screen shot of the broad and audience campaign).

The client has not given us info yet on if conversion has increased on their end yet, as data needs to mature for 7-10 days before it's accurate, but I feel confident things will pop-up to where they used to be (6-7% conversion of lead to sale) by mid September.

MORAL OF THIS POST

Try being aggressive with tCPA bids, I knew this to be true, but sometimes we get stuck in our ways which can hold us back. In this instance ALWAYS using the same tCPA bid had me stuck in this account.🙌

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