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Google recently announced Ads Smart Bidding Exploration, its revolutionary new feature that allows reaching out to untapped conversion opportunities without disabling existing audience targeting by bidding only on more relevant search queries.
The pay-per-click (PPC) landscape has undergone a significant transformation.
Just announced at Pay-Per-Click Google Marketing Live, Ads Smart Bidding Exploration has officially launched and is now available as an experimental tool to help advertisers get more conversions in a never-ending challenge to beat their own best results.
This announcement defines an important turning point for Google Ads bidding strategies and enables advertisers to capitalize on missed queries. Whether it’s to maximize ROAS or keep past performance metrics, this update requires attention.
Smart Bidding Experiments Functionality
Smart Bidding Discovery is easy to enable in your existing campaign structure while keeping the same audience targeting and keyword strategies. Instead of changing these core components, it simply enables the bidding algorithm to find more opportunities—especially in Broad Match and DSA campaigns. Flexibility in your ROAS targets is crucial to being able to opt-in. You might need a 10-30% tweak from standard ROAS goals to give Google’s AI room to improve your bids on queries with a chance of nice conversions that will actually come in at an allowable cost.
Rather than applying a blanket ROAS adjustment at the campaign level, which could result in variability, Smart Bidding Exploration adapts the bidding for only the queries that were excluded.
Insightful Reporting
Privacy constraints prevent us from providing a finer-grained analysis of new search queries, but Google will provide data on what the effects of Smart Bidding Exploration have been in a Bid Strategy report. The report will cover the following topics:
- Specialized search categories that drive both impressions and conversions
- The amount of traffic from such categories
- New conversion rates vs. your baseline
Google is starting to offer plus dialing, rather than a clump of it. Furthermore, the capability is completely compatible with Drafts & Experiments, giving marketers the ability to easily control differences in ad performance. The launch fully supports portfolio bid strategies, and SA360 support is on the horizon.
Why Advertisers Should Test Smart Bidding Exploration Opportunity Rationale
For those of you with search campaigns that are plateauing or feel they are reaching their limit in terms of traffic volume, it’s a chance to uncover more conversions. It provides an opportunity to increase conversions without requiring a significant campaign revamp or budget increase, all while maintaining your existing audience targeting.
Unlike Optimize Targeting on Display or Demand Gen, which widen ad targeting, Smart Bidding Exploration maintains the targeting but discovers new possibilities within the existing criteria it may not have seen before.
In some cases, the opportunity to improve the performance of campaigns with inflexible ROAS targets can arise without even realizing it. Smart Bidding Exploration has served as a tool to slightly ease the constraints by enabling Google’s AI to identify and uncover previously hidden opportunities.
What Google Is Trying to Accomplish With This Update
Smart Bidding Exploration is not just about a new toggle feature; it’s a new understanding of what’s possible with conversions through Google Ads. In the past, advertisers have optimized known methods to achieve ROAS or CPA, focusing on one target and ignoring a broader market opportunity. “Google uses Smart Bidding to suggest to advertisers to no longer rely on the traditional way that many advertisers currently use the not-so-impressive old bidding strategies, which, he argues, have little focus on growth.”