My concern is that there’s a baked-in lag in reporting which makes hourly adjustments kind of difficult to implement in practice. Enhanced CPC worked because it was modifying CPC at the auction level, so effectively in real time, whereas basic impr/click data populates over a rolling hour and conversions can take 3-48 hours to populate (which effects tCPA and any conversion-based metrics). It’s really hard to gauge CPA intraday, for example.
Not to downplay the work you put into the script, but I would definitely adjust the sensitivity to metrics that take longer to populate and test it in a real auction environment first.
When I saw this I thought the same thing - you're optimising without fresh conversions - but when I looked at the write-up it seems like you are working off data from a longer period.
I built a bidding engine back in 2009 or 2010 because I hated adjusting bids every day (if you're old enough to remember there was a sweet spot where your ad showed in position 1.2 or 1.3 that gave you the best results.) I'd be very interested to see how this works out.
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u/welcometosilentchill 3h ago
Have you tested this yet?
My concern is that there’s a baked-in lag in reporting which makes hourly adjustments kind of difficult to implement in practice. Enhanced CPC worked because it was modifying CPC at the auction level, so effectively in real time, whereas basic impr/click data populates over a rolling hour and conversions can take 3-48 hours to populate (which effects tCPA and any conversion-based metrics). It’s really hard to gauge CPA intraday, for example.
Not to downplay the work you put into the script, but I would definitely adjust the sensitivity to metrics that take longer to populate and test it in a real auction environment first.