Google continues to expand on its automated bidding solutions in an effort to encourage more users to move from manual bidding.

To this day, the automated bidding only supported CPM as the objective, which, if you are not just going after people’s eyeballs, is rather restrictive. Which is why Google decided to introduce outcome based buying in Display & Video 360 which allows you to pay just for the KPIs you want.

That means that if you set up your target CPA, Google says that your outcome based campaigns will then be optimized against that desired conversion and you can also choose to pay for clicks only, not impressions.

Now, we always had a bit of an issue with the rhetoric of “if nobody clicks, you don’t pay!” (call it a pet peeve….) and that you can get ads for free and somehow trick the system – your ads won’t be cheaper just because you pay for clicks. If your ads are running for a month and get just one click, the click could cost $60 instead of $5 if you were running against impressions. You are still paying either way. The caveat here is that your ads are optimized against the desired action and thus, theoretically, should be more efficient for what you are trying to achieve.

We definitely think Google is taking a step in the right direction to make programmatic more than just mass-awareness tool and make life easier for us more conversion-conscious marketers.

Read their full announcement here