After you turn on Smart Bidding and see progress towards your goals after the initial 2-week ramp-up period, very little campaign management is needed.
Significant campaign changes can disrupt performance because the algorithm will need to learn about and adjust to the new settings. These changes include (but aren’t limited to) bid increases, new creatives and updates to targeting and audience lists.
Example
If you just opted in to automatic targeting and became eligible for a significant number of new impressions (for which Smart Bidding doesn’t have historical data), you may see a short-term disruption in your performance. If you need to significantly change a display campaign currently using Smart Bidding, make all the changes at once to reduce learning time. You can check the status column to see if the algorithm is still learning about your settings.
Effects of changing bids in your campaign
- If you need to make optimisations to the campaign, increase or decrease your bids by 20% and wait a week between changes. Small, infrequent target CPA or target ROAS bid changes aren’t likely to cause a noticeable problem. If you have very high conversion volume in an ad group (for example, more than 100 conversions per day), you can make more frequent changes.
- Temporary performance declines are normal. The algorithm learns over time and adjusts bids to compensate for poor performance. Lowering the target CPA or increasing the target ROAS can significantly hurt volume and performance.
Conversion delays
It can take up to several weeks for some users to see an ad and then convert. Advertisers pay the CPC almost immediately, but conversions for those clicks are reported based on the set conversion window. As a result, very recent performance may look poor, but it gets better over time as more users convert and those conversions are attributed back to the day that the click took place. Check your web analytics data to determine your average conversion delay. Learn more about viewing conversion lag reporting data.
- Consider conversion delays when setting your conversion window to make sure that you're capturing all conversions. If you set a shorter conversion window, you may see results more quickly and speed up Smart Bidding learning, but you won't see the full impact of your advertising.
- If you have a conversion delay of longer than seven days, it’s more difficult to predict a conversion rate, which will impact our ability to accurately meet your target CPA or target ROAS. We wait until we have the majority of conversions recorded before determining if our predictions were accurate. This means that you may see volatility while we wait for sufficient conversion data.
- If you're limited by budget, and performance is worse than your target CPA or target ROAS, use Maximise conversions or raise the budget until you're no longer constrained by your budget. Budget constraints can hinder performance as the campaign isn't able to participate in auctions that may be highly likely to drive a conversion.
