In the dynamic landscape of mobile app marketing, staying ahead requires cutting-edge technologies. Our new AI technology elevates ad campaign success by bringing precision and efficiency to performance optimization and adopting a holistic approach to keyword bidding.
AI Bid Optimization is a robust algorithm designed to boost conversions while adhering to your target. Leveraging innovative AI solutions from SplitMetrics, this goal-oriented strategy manages bids, aiming for maximized conversions volume and more rapid results. It takes a comprehensive methodology, automatically managing bids for the entire portfolio of your account’s keywords instead of doing so on an individual keyword level.
🎯 Dual-Goal Optimization: Simultaneously focuses on achieving your key performance indicators (KPIs) and maximizing key in-app events.
🎯 Efficiency & Speed: Quickly reaches KPIs, saving valuable time and resources.
🎯 Effortless setup: Intelligently selects the optimal date range and step of adjustment, gradually introducing optimal bid adjustments within your specified limits.
🎯 Budget Pacing: Ensures optimal daily budget utilization by preventing under- or over-spending with intelligent adjustments. Eliminate budget constraints and maximize growth potential within your targets!
AI Bid Optimization vs. Condition-Based Bid Strategies
Condition-based strategies optimize bids at an individual keyword level, focusing on their performance independently. They provide precise control and transparency for targeted goals and are great at managing campaigns with clear KPIs, such as scaling conversions, reducing UA costs, or maintaining consistent CPA or ROAS, all with minimal time investment
AI Bid Optimization goes further by analyzing large datasets, learning, and adapting dynamically to uncover insights beyond static settings. It takes a holistic approach, managing bids to achieve KPIs at the campaign level. This makes it perfect for large-scale campaigns with complex goals or when maximum efficiency and scalability are essential.
Such AI approach revolutionizes campaign management, enabling centralized bidding for campaigns with shared goals while delivering swift, cost-effective conversions seamlessly.
Our AI algorithm operates in a continuous cycle of prediction and bid recalibration, applying changes once every 24 hours.
🤖 Prediction: The algorithm forecasts the expected spend and conversions for each keyword, leveraging historical performance data for accuracy. It evaluates the entire portfolio of keywords based on the performance history of all keywords in its training dataset, and the portfolio's competitive landscape in the given storefront.
🧮 Recalibration: Using advanced mathematical techniques, the algorithm calculates the ideal bid distribution in real-time and dynamically assigns bids across keywords daily to maximize conversions efficiently.
This complex AI approach reduces spend wasters and optimizes search result budgets, saving thousands annually. Its continuous cycle ensures consistent, adaptive bid optimization while maintaining an average target CPA or ROAS across the portfolio.
❗ Note: Keywords cannot be excluded from automatic bid recalibration. The AI algorithms rely on full data access for comprehensive analysis and prediction accuracy.
Go to Optimization Hub > Bid Optimization Strategies. Click Create Strategy, select your app, and enter a name for your new strategy.
Setting up AI-powered bid optimization requires careful consideration of campaign selection and your target KPIs.
Campaign Selection
You can now combine multiple campaigns into one AI-driven strategy, optimizing them towards a single goal for better performance and efficiency.
❗Note: Only include campaigns with the same business objective and KPIs to ensure effective optimization.
🆕 New Campaign Filters & Goals
With the latest update, campaign selection and goal setup have become even more flexible:
When choosing a campaign for a Bid Strategy, you can now filter campaigns by CPA, ROAS, or CPI, making it easier to focus on the campaigns most relevant to your optimization goals 👇
It’s now possible to create an AI Bid ROAS or Cohort ROAS Strategy with a new Scale Up goal, designed to help you accelerate revenue growth while staying aligned with your return targets 👇
For CPI-focused campaigns, you can launch an AI Bid CPI strategies with three goal options: Decrease CPI, Maintain, or Scale Up, giving you clear paths to reduce costs, sustain performance, or increase installs as needed 👇
These enhancements simplify campaign setup and provide greater control over how AI bid optimization aligns with your business objectives.
Why is this a game-changer for you?
✅ Maximize AI Coverage – Get more of your ad spend optimized with AI, even for smaller campaigns.
✅ Simplify Campaign Management – Control and optimize campaigns all in one place.
✅ Better Performance – Avoid local optimizations and let AI find the best bid strategy across multiple campaigns.
When AI Multi-Campaign Approach Works Best
🚀 Lack of Time and Control (Multiple Geos) – Grouping similar campaigns allows for better focus, even when campaigns in different geos lack sufficient control.
🚀 Break Down Siloed Campaigns – Combine campaigns with similar KPIs that currently operate independently, ensuring cohesive optimization for the entire portfolio.
🚀 Resource Optimization – Consolidating campaigns with similar goals improves scalability, reducing the need for managing multiple individual campaigns.
Campaign Eligibility Criteria for AI Strategy 🛠️
To ensure the best results, campaigns must meet the following criteria:
Only campaigns with Delivery Status = Running can be included.
➡️ For CPA optimization:
Campaigns must generate at least 10 daily events on average (within a single in-app event category) over 30 days.
The average delay between a tap and your target action must not be greater than 30 days for optimal AI performance. Focus on target actions with shorter delays (e.g., subscriptions instead of long-term purchases).
The share of spend with a delay of over 30 days must be ≤ 90%.
🆕 For ROAS optimization: revenue at least $500 per month, 90% of revenue should be generated within 62 days after ad tap.
How to select eligible campaigns?
To make campaign selection easier, use the toggle Show recommended campaigns for AI Bid Optimization to filter eligible campaigns, and choose one or more campaigns.
Additionally, to secure optimal strategy performance with automated bidding:
✅ Minimize daily budget changes to maintain consistent impressions.
✅ Be mindful of any active automated rules that change bids in the campaign under the strategy. When there’s an overlap, these rules will skip keywords managed by the strategy, allowing the strategy to take full control of bid adjustments.
Target Metric
For AI-powered bid optimization, you can now choose between the following targets:
Target CPA: Optimizes for a specified Cost per Action (CPA), making it suitable for targeting Cost per Conversion metrics like Cost per Trial, Cost per Subscription and other.
Target ROAS 🆕: Optimizes for Return on Ad Spend (ROAS). This ensures efficient spend distribution across single & multi-campaign setups, driving performance and maximizing revenue - all while maintaining your ROAS targets effortlessly. 💡 This is particularly valuable for businesses focused on increasing their ROI predictability and driving more growth with their campaigns.
Click the Target CPA/ Target ROAS to unfold and select the key metric you’d like the strategy to focus on for optimization👇
If you select the CPA or ROAS target and the campaign is eligible for AI optimization, the AI icon will appear, indicating that AI Bid Optimization is enabled by default. If you wish to disable AI, click the ⚙️ icon and turn off the AI toggle.
🆕 Samba 2.5 leverages an improved decision-making algorithm for bid distribution to invest your dollar smarter. By anticipating future conversions and optimizing bids in real-time, while preventing overspend, you can drive on average 55% increase in revenue from optimizing ROAS with AI.
Let AI work smarter, so you can strategize better 🚀
Goal Selection
Each goal is designed to optimize specific outcomes, such as increasing visibility, driving conversion volume, improving overall performance efficiency or ROI. Align the goal with your campaign's objectives for optimal outcomes. What’s your focus?
I Focus on Visibility | If your primary objective is to maximize visibility and reach, opt for Scale up conversions to increase impressions and engagement - ideal for brand awareness campaigns where exposure is key. Strategy will focus on maximizing conversions within your target CPA with AI-powered bid adjustments. |
I Focus on Conversion Volume | For campaigns prioritizing a higher number of conversions, choose Scale up conversions or Maintain Conversions at target CPA goal. These settings ensure greater reach and steady growth in conversions while maintaining cost-efficiency aligned with your target. |
I Focus on Performance Results | If your primary focus is performance metrics, such as reducing costs or maximizing ROI, set the Decrease average CPA goal. The strategy will help you achieve CPA below your historical averages while increasing conversion rates. If the goal is to keep performance consistent, use the Maintain Conversions at target CPA goal to achieve sustainable results without compromising efficiency. |
I Focus on Maximizing Revenue (ROAS target) 🆕 | For campaigns focused on maximizing revenue while staying within a set target ROAS, select Maintain average ROAS as your goal. This ensures the strategy optimizes spend to maintain a stable average ROAS across all keywords, tracking performance metrics and making adjustments to meet or exceed revenue goals for each keyword. |
By aligning your bid strategy with your campaign's specific goals, you can ensure a more targeted and effective approach to achieving desired outcomes.
Target Value
AI strategy adjusts bids automatically, thus selecting an optimal target value is key to efficient optimization. Analyze your target KPI over the last 30 or 90 days to define your target value or choose the recommended one.
⭐ Our smart legibility assessment algorithm evaluates historical campaign data to recommend an optimal target value, taking into account conversion delays (e.g. when a user taps on an ad but completes the target action, like a purchase, several days later). By excluding data from the last few days, the algorithm ensures metrics like CPA and ROAS accurately reflect campaign performance, allowing the AI strategy to optimize smartly and efficiently.
🚨We will also notify you if the value is too high or low, or if another strategy (e.g., Condition-Based) may better suit your goals.
Automated Bidding
Define your lower and upper bid limits to guide the strategy’s bid adjustments. AI will choose an optimal date range based on data sufficiency and introduce bid adjustments gradually within the limits to prevent spikes in performance and overspending.
Want more control? You can turn off automated bidding at any time. The strategy will then only suggest bid adjustments in the Suggested Bid column instead of applying them automatically.
Budget Pacing is an AI-powered feature that dynamically adjusts your daily budget based on real-time performance predictions and market opportunities, helping you stay within your Monthly Budget Cap while optimizing your campaign performance.
📈 The strategy increases your daily budget when: | 📉 The strategy decreases your daily budget when: |
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❗ Budget Pacing limitations in Beta:
Available for single-campaign strategies with CPA target only.
Only for strategies with Automated Bidding enabled.
Decreases are limited to the first five days of the calendar month
To enable, click the + Add Budget Pacing button and specify the settings.
Automatically adjust Daily Budget toggle: Enable for automatic budget changes, or disable for only daily budget suggestions in the Usage & Recommendation column.
Monthly Budget Cap (required): Specify your maximum spend limit (cap) for the given calendar month.
Upper Daily Budget Limit (optional): Add the limit if you need to restrict the maximum daily budget increase and control how far the budget can go.
Notice how the current daily budget value will be always displayed below to guide you.
What is AI Budget Allocation?
AI Budget Allocation (Beta) is a machine learning–powered algorithm designed to intelligently redistribute budgets across a portfolio of campaigns. Instead of managing individual daily budgets manually, the system evaluates campaign performance and automatically assigns spend where it will have the most impact.
The algorithm predicts the next day’s spend, events, and CPA, and then distributes the Shared Daily Budget to maximize conversions at the lowest possible cost per action (CPA).
💡 Shared Daily Budget is the maximum spend limit for all campaigns in a single day, acting as an overarching cap for the entire campaign portfolio.
❗ Shared Daily Budget cannot be lower than the sum of the current Daily Budget caps of campaigns included in the strategy.
❗ Shared Daily Budget can be changed at any time.
This feature is currently available in Beta for CPA objectives only.
How to use AI Budget Allocation
To start testing AI Budget Allocation, follow these steps:
Select a multi-campaign CPA bid strategy — or create a new one.
Define a Shared Daily Budget value for your portfolio of campaigns.
Navigate to the + Add Budget management section 👇
Determine the desirable Shared Daily Budget value and enter it into the field 👇
AI Budget Allocation Availability
Users: Available to all Full Access plan users.
Campaigns: Any campaign suitable for CPA bid strategies.
Strategies supported: CPA bid strategies (both condition-based and AI-driven), new or existing.
Number of campaigns: Supports multi-campaign strategies.
Target metric: Cost per target conversion (CPA).
Benefits of AI Budget Allocation
AI Budget Allocation delivers significant advantages for advertisers managing complex or large-scale campaign portfolios:
Boosts ROI by prioritizing high-performing campaigns and redistributing budgets efficiently.
Streamlines operations across large portfolios and geo mixes by centralizing budget management.
Adapts dynamically to market changes, demand fluctuations, and pricing trends — without the need for constant manual intervention.
You can benefit most from AI Budget Allocation if you:
Set “realistic” Daily Budgets for campaigns.
Frequently adjust Daily Budgets.
Have multiple automated rules for Daily Budget changes.
Manage a large portfolio of campaigns and/or geographies.
AI Budget Allocation vs. Budget Pacing
While both features automate budget management, they work at different levels:
| AI Budget Pacing | AI Budget Allocation |
Required strategy setup | Single-campaign | Multi-campaign |
Required settings |
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Goal | Maximise monthly events at target tCPA for a Monthly Budget | Maximise daily events at target tCPA for the set of campaigns with available Shared budget |
What it does | Optimally distributes Monthly Budget across days for one campaign | Optimally distributes Shared Daily Budget across several campaigns |
How it brings value | Detects days with lower relative CPA to increase budget on these days and decrease on others | Identifies campaigns with better CPA and re-allocates budget to them from less-profitable campaign |
👉 Together, they complement each other:
Use Budget Pacing to optimize performance inside a single campaign.
Use AI Budget Allocation to optimize efficiency across campaigns.
Adjusting Targets After Launch
You may need to adjust your target value as campaign goals evolve — raising it to increase spending or lowering it to improve efficiency. Approach these adjustments carefully:
✅ Make gradual adjustments, without major shifts. If the system suggests a value higher than your desired goal, avoid drastic cuts. While target adjustments won’t reset the AI strategy’s learning, significant changes can cause sharp fluctuations in spend or conversion volume.
✅ Monitor performance weekly or bi-weekly after adjustments. This incremental approach helps maintain conversion volume and ensures smooth performance.
💡 Tips for success:
Run Multiple Scenarios: Don’t settle for just one simulation. Test various CPT bids to find the sweet spot where you maximize conversions at the lowest cost.
Review Data Daily: The ad landscape changes rapidly. Use the ✨ AI Bid Simulator’s daily insights to adjust your strategy based on the latest data.
After creating the strategy, we recommend waiting for a week before reviewing the first changes. It typically takes at least 2 weeks to observe the first results. This timeframe allows the AI models to calibrate and account for any weekly cycle fluctuations and trends. If data volume is low or the target value significantly deviates from historical performance, a longer evaluation period may be necessary.
When assessing the strategy’s performance, consider that historical performance should be evaluated with conversion delay time in mind, as this can impact the observed results. If the strategy’s behavior significantly deviates from expected outcomes (e.g., you set a lower target value, but the AI increases bids and costs), contact your Customer Success manager for guidance, and corrective action should be taken.
Bid Strategy Analytics
To gain deeper insights into your bid strategy performance, use the Bid Strategy Analytics tool available in the Bid Strategy dashboard. This feature offers detailed, actionable data to evaluate the effectiveness of your AI-driven bid optimizations and make informed adjustments. 📖 Learn more here.
Ads Manager
To monitor the history of bid adjustments, check the Keywords dashboard in Ads Manager.
➡️ Check the Suggested Bid column for key insights via purple tooltips. These tooltips display bid adjustment states, actions taken by the strategy, and timestamps of the last change for full transparency.
➡️ Use the Bid Strategy column to identify the strategy responsible for specific bid adjustments.
➡️ Check the Usage & Recommendation column. This metric shows how efficiently the daily budget is being utilized. If Budget Pacing is enabled, it will show AI-driven daily budget recommendations. Adjustments to the budget can be made based on these recommendations to ensure optimal campaign performance. 📖 Learn more
➡️ Analyze individual keyword performance with the CPT Bid metric on detailed charts. Use annotations to keep track of automatic bid adjustments and changes in keyword performance over time.
Change History
The history of automatic bid adjustments is also available in Change History, enabling you to track and analyze changes.
That’s it! Revolutionize how you optimize keyword performance at a portfolio level with our cutting-edge AI algorithm. Seamlessly navigate towards your target goals, saving precious time for strategic focus on other priorities 🚀
📖 Click here to learn more about how Condition-Based bid optimization strategies at SplitMetrics Acquire work.