When setting up an ad group in your new campaign in Apple Ads Advanced or adding a new ad group in SplitMetrics Acquire, one of the steps is to add your maximum cost-per-tap bid, or Default Max CPT Bid. This is the maximum amount you’re willing to pay for a tap on your ad.
You indicate your Max CPT Bid for all types of placements, such as the Today tab, Product pages, Search tab, and Search results. The actual amount you'll pay is the result of a second price auction, so you can bid competitively without the worry of overpaying.
Default Max CPT Bid is especially important for Search results placements in Search Match ad groups, as it is the actual CPT bid that will be used to determine whether you will win an auction with a certain search term.
Therefore, in your discovery campaigns in ad groups with Search Match on, Apple will use your default CPT bid set for this ad group.
When you add new keywords to an ad group, they will be added with the default CPT bid unless you change the CPT bids manually.
☝️Note that in all other ad groups that contain keywords (broad or exact match), the bids set for individual keywords will override the ad group default CPT bid.
Moreover, in ad groups where you have many keywords with different bids, the default CPT bid can serve as a quick reminder for you of what bids you have on average for the keywords in that ad group.
How to change Default Max CPT Bid?
1. Use the SplitMetrics Aquire feature Quick Edit. Go to the dashboard on the Ad group level, tick an ad group (or several ad groups), click Quick Edit -> Default Max Bid, and increase or decrease it by a particular amount/percent. Read more about bulk editing here.
2. Make changes at the Ad group level. Go to the Ads Manager -> Ad groups and click the necessary Ad group. Click the button Edit Ad Group next to its name to make changes.
3. Run an automated rule to change the default CPT bid. Go to the dashboard on the Ad group level, tick an ad group (or several ad groups), click Rules -> Ad Groups, and select the conditions for the rule.
4. Alter your default CPT bid in your Apple Ads account from your Campaigns or Ad Groups dashboards. Here's an Apple Ads guide on how to set and adjust bids. Once you have changed the default maximum bid in Apple Ads, it will be synchronized with your SplitMetrics Acquire account.
How to track the latest changes to Default Max CPT Bid?
We have enhanced detailed and comparison Ad groups charts with the Default Max Bid change history option to help you keep tabs on the statistics and make more informed bidding decisions.
You can analyze the dynamic of bid changes for all types of campaigns and see who made these changes. How does it work?
⚙️ Go to the Ad group level (or Ad group settings), hover over the ad group you want to analyze, and click the Chart icon. Add the Default Max Bid metric to the chart by clicking the Plus icon. You can find it under the Settings category or search for it by typing its name. Select the necessary date range and granularity (daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly).
☝️You can add other metrics to the chart, for example, Impressions, CPA, ROAS, etc., by clicking the Plus icon. This allows you to track how changing the Default Max Bid affects volume and performance.
⚙️ Click Chart Settings > Show annotations. To see the annotation, hover over the annotation marker and click it. You can open several annotations simultaneously. To close it, click X.
Annotations shed light on the following information:
1. Timestamp: when the bid was changed.
2. Old value → New value: how the bid was changed (individually or in bulk), and the last and current values.
3. Who changed the bid: user, rule, API.
4. Link to a change source: the user's email, Apple Ads API, or the automated rule's name with the link to its settings.
☝️You can see only the last change of the CPT bid value for the selected granularity. For example, for the weekly granularity, you will see the last change for the week, even if there were several bid changes previously during this week.
⚙️ Compare several ad groups by selecting them on the dashboard. Tick ad groups, click Actions -> Compare selected ad groups. Select the metric, the necessary date range, and granularity (daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly). Two display options are available: Line chart and Bar chart.
You can also learn how to track bidding changes in Change History here 🙌