POAS & commercial bidding
Can Google Ads bid on contribution margin?
Why this matters
Google Ads is a conversion-value bidder. The bidder optimises against whatever value you feed it. If you feed gross revenue, it bids to revenue. If you feed margin-weighted revenue, it bids close to margin. So 'can Google bid on margin?' becomes 'how cleanly can I feed margin into the value signal?'.
Three mechanisms do most of the work. Value rules adjust conversion value at the campaign level: useful for blunt rules like 'subtract 20% for high-return categories'. Supplemental product feeds let you carry margin or profit per SKU into Shopping and PMax. Custom labels let you segment SKUs into bidding buckets that can carry different tROAS targets.
The limits matter. Value rules are coarse: they apply across whole campaigns or audiences. Supplemental feeds work but require disciplined data hygiene. PMax in particular is opaque about how it weighs the signals you feed it, which is why many brands run a Standard Shopping campaign in parallel for SKUs where margin precision matters most.
Done end-to-end, the effective behaviour is close to margin bidding. Done partially, you are still bidding to gross revenue and calling it something else.
How JudeLuxe approaches this
JudeLuxe builds the margin signal as part of onboarding: profit feed, value rules per commercial role, and where appropriate a Standard Shopping ringfence for SKUs PMax should not be allowed to touch.
The BOI™ methodology page documents the full mechanism; the POAS vs MER vs ROAS pillar explains the maths under it.
Related reading: BOI™. Bid On Intent methodology.
Related questions
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