In this tutorial Aaron Young explains why the smart bidding strategy is the most impactful lever in a Google Ads campaign and presents a step‑by‑step framework used at Define Digital Academy to avoid costly mistakes. He outlines a concise checklist that a campaign must pass before switching to smart bidding: (1) at least 30 conversions in the last 30 days, (2) stable conversion volume without large variance, (3) no changes to target CPA, target ROAS, or bidding strategy in the past six weeks, and (4) no budget adjustments in the past two weeks. He stresses the need for patience after any change, noting that performance can dip for one to two weeks before improving. Young then mentions two proprietary tools that automate parts of the process – a Claude‑powered Smart Bidding Coach and a Keyword and Search Terms Audit Tool – and invites viewers to claim free access via a link in the description.
Chapters
The most significant change you can make inside of any Google Ads campaign is your smart bidding strategy. Get it right and it prints money. Get it wrong and you might as well just burn up cash every single day. What I want to show you now is the exact framework that we use inside of Define Digital Academy to make sure that we never get our smart bidding settings wrong. And these are the questions we ask every time to find out whether a campaign is ready for smart bidding. The first thing is you need to make sure that you've got 30 conversions in 30 days. Pure and simple, with smart bidding, you need to have enough data. Secondly, you want to make sure that there is not any massive swings in variance in your conversion data. You want to have a nice stable account. If you pass those two, two tests, you can then go to the next step, and that is, have you changed your target CPA, target ROAS, or your bidding strategy in the last 6 weeks? The reason why this is so important is that when it comes to smart bidding, this is not a change that you can make every single day, and it's not even a change you can make every single week. Now in this short format, I don't have the reason to explain why, but there's just so many variables. As soon as you make a change, you need to give it time, and quite often results can get a little bit worse for 1 or 2 weeks before they get better inside of Google Ads. And then you also want to make sure, have you changed your budget in the past 2 weeks? It's really, really hard to focus on profitability and spending extra money at the same time. So you want to separate out your budget changes and your smart bidding changes. And if you've passed all those tests, you can then go through and proceed and change your smart bidding strategy inside of Google Ads. Now, inside of Google Ads, we've actually built a framework with Claude that actually does this for us automatically, and it's called our Smart Bidding Coach. But just for following me here, we've actually got this tool which is called the Keyword and Search Terms Audit Tool, and it gives you a complete audit on any Google Ads account. And if you want to get free access today, all you need to do is to follow that link in the description below. See ya!
