• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, March 26, 2019

Adobe Advertising Cloud on Tuesday announced updates to its search capability that optimize performance across multiple search engine bidding strategies. Google, with its smart bidding, became the first publisher supported by the capabilities within the Performance Optimization feature. 

Search marketers can now manage and optimize across keyword CPC, tCPA and tROAS bidding tactics within the Advertising Cloud Search platform. They also gain transparency into which of the optimization settings deliver the best performance outcomes.

The major update extends features in Performance Optimization making Adobe Advertising Cloud Search the first to offer a hybrid bid optimization approach, with the help of Adobe Sensei, their artificial intelligence and machine-learning technology, according to Adobe.

The technology evaluates search marketing results and distributes media investment across campaigns through bidding technologies that automatically optimize each campaign’s ROI.

Search marketers can now use one platform to manage and optimize across bidding technologies and search engines.

In other news from Adobe, The Simply Group (TSG), a UK retailer that sells outdoor goods and leisure wear through several e-commerce sites, grew its paid search strategy by 62% in return on spend during the week of Black Friday, and a 125% boost in revenue for its Simply Scuba brand using Adobe Advertising Cloud.

Sally Allsop, head of marketing at TSG, believes automation plays a key roll.

It wasn’t easy and quite confusing because the company supports four brands: Simply Scuba, Simply Beach, Simply Swim, and Simply Hike. All with very different audiences. It meant managing many different types of keywords for paid search while trying to run focused campaigns.  

TSG shifted from manually managing search marketing to using Adobe technology that could process data more effectively than any person.

TSG also discovered on Bing Ads an untapped audience for Simply Beach and Simply Swim, where female shoppers age 35 and older became customers at a higher rate. Orders resulting from Bing traffic rose 87%, and revenue doubled, all through data and automation.

The company isn't using the newly released platform, but the updates will help Simply and other companies achieve better results.