Introduction to automated bids for install campaigns

Understand how automated bidding spends your advertising funds to deliver ads.

Read time 1 minute

Last updated a year ago

Automated CPI bidding automatically manages and spends your daily budget. This strategy maximizes installs for budget-constrained campaigns and optimizes budget usage throughout the day. Instead of always using the maximum specified CPI bid, automated bidding controls spending and optimizes budget usage by focusing on opportunities with a high predicted value. Automated campaigns bid dynamically by discounting the maximum bid according to a machine learning algorithm. If the maximum CPI bid is restrictive enough that the campaign cannot spend its daily budget, thereby limiting campaign delivery, then Unity does not discount the bid and the automated campaign effectively uses a manual, static CPI bidding strategy. For example, assume the following:

Your campaign wins an impression if it bids $0.01 or more.
Your campaign has a daily budget of $1.
Your campaign has a CPI bid of $1.
Your campaign observes 300 opportunities throughout the day.
The first 100 opportunities have a predicted conversion rate of 1%.
The next 200 opportunities have a predicted conversion rate of 2%.

With a CPI bid of $1, the example campaign would be expected to run out of money after the first 100 impressions, because a 1% conversion rate would yield one install. If you instead lower the bid by a fixed 50% and bid $0.50, the example campaign would lose the first 100 opportunities but win the latter 200 opportunities and yield 2 installs for the same cost. To use the Automated Bidding strategy, add the maximum bids for each country you target with the campaign and the system will automatically optimize delivery against your max bids. Use this strategy to control the maximum that you are willing to pay per install, knowing that the actual price will be somewhere between zero and the max bid. It's recommended best practice to set relatively high maximum bids even with small budgets. Automated Bidding dynamically discounts the actual bids to help you win impressions and meet your campaign goals.

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