Currently, ad groups using manual CPC bidding which contain managed placements are required to have a managed placements bid (siteMaxCpc). Today, we’re announcing that we’ll be sunsetting siteMaxCpc on March 15, 2011 to help simplify bid management on the Google Display Network (GDN).
We’re making this change in response to feedback that having multiple ad group bids for the GDN complicates bid management. Most of you using managed placements are already using placement-level bidding to control your costs on the GDN, and you’ll be able to continue to do this. In addition, the content bid (keywordContentMaxCpc) will continue to be available, offering control at the ad group level.
Here’s how this change will affect you: after March 15, we’ll stop accepting changes to ManualCpcAdGroupBids that modify siteMaxCpc to set it to anything other than 0. After that date, calls that attempt to set siteMaxCpc will return the error BiddingError.Reason.CANNOT_SET_SITE_MAX_CPC.
We’ll be announcing this change to all AdWords users early next year but wanted to let you know early so that you can prepare to modify your applications to stop accepting new siteMaxCpc bids. When we make the broader announcement, we’ll make it possible to “self-migrate” existing managed placements bids by setting them to zero and modifying their other bids as appropriate. In March, when we stop accepting changes to these bids entirely, we’ll migrate any remaining bids to the placement level, according to clear rules which we’ll share with you in a blog post in January.
If you have any questions about this change, we’ll be happy to answer them on our forum.
Posted by Prabhu Balasubramanian, Product Manager
