Bid

A bid is the price an advertiser is willing to pay for a specific ad event — one impression, one click, one conversion, one install — submitted into an auction that decides which ad is shown. The bid is not the price actually paid: in a second-price auction the winner pays just above the runner-up's bid, and in a first-price auction the winner pays its own bid, while in both cases the platform weighs the bid together with a predicted quality or relevance score, so a lower bid with a higher predicted click-through rate can beat a higher bid with a poor one.

Bids come in two forms. A manual bid is a fixed value the buyer sets and the platform holds to, giving full control and a predictable ceiling on cost per event but requiring constant tuning as competition and performance move.

An automated bid is set by the platform for each auction to hit a target the buyer specifies — a cost per acquisition, a return on ad spend, or simply "spend the budget" — trading per-auction control for the platform's ability to price each opportunity by predicted value.

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In context

Bid strategy is inseparable from budget, targeting and creative. A high bid with a small budget wins few, expensive auctions; a low bid with a large budget may not spend at all if it loses every auction.

Narrow targeting raises the clearing price because fewer impressions match; broad targeting lowers it but hands audience selection to the algorithm. And creative quality feeds directly into the auction: a strong creative earns a higher predicted engagement score, so the same bid wins more impressions at a lower effective price.

In iGaming the bid is also constrained by compliance and licensing. Bidding into an out-of-market GEO wins impressions that cannot legally convert; bidding on a platform that bans gambling wins nothing at all through legitimate means.

Within a compliant setup, buyers typically start with a manual bid to establish a baseline cost per result, then move to automated bidding once the conversion pixel has enough events to optimise reliably.

Worked example

A buyer opens a push campaign at a $0.40 manual CPC and wins 55% of auctions. CTR data shows the creative is strong, so they lower the bid to $0.28; win rate falls to 40% but volume is still sufficient, and cost per registration drops 22% because the cheaper clicks convert at the same rate.

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