Increase traffic diversity with Google AI
Note: Bidding exploration is currently in a limited beta. Only select accounts will have access to this feature. Please reach out to your Google Account Team for information.
Bidding exploration is a new AI-powered feature designed to identify new sources of valuable traffic to help you maximise performance for search campaigns using Smart Bidding.
Benefits
- Scaled performance: Exploration will intelligently bid on expanded reach to uncover new pockets of valuable traffic aligned with your marketing objectives while targeting a 10% lower ROAS target.
- Note: Select allowlisted advertisers will have the option to further customise allowable ROAS tolerance beyond 10%.
- Increased traffic diversity: Bidding Exploration will use the 10% lower ROAS tolerance to increase bids to drive increased traffic diversity: Unique search categories with impressions.
Best practices
Eligible search campaigns using tROAS will have the option to enable bidding exploration in campaign settings.
- Campaigns should be using broad match or Dynamic Search Ads.
- Campaigns should not be limited by budget, because this does not enable bidding exploration to be effective. If a campaign is limited by budget, we may temporarily disable the bidding exploration feature in the backend, to maximise the campaign’s performance. We will display a yellow warning nudge in the settings page if this happens.
- Enabling Exploration with existing ROAS targets. It is not suggested to increase ROAS target to offset Exploration, as this will limit the ability to drive increased traffic diversity.
- Run a campaign experiment to measure the incremental impact of bidding exploration. See below for details.
Instructions
To enable bidding exploration for an eligible campaign, follow the steps below:
- In your Google Ads account, click the Campaigns icon
.
- Click the Campaigns drop-down in the section menu, then click Campaigns.
- Select the eligible campaign that you want to edit.
- Click Settings in the Page menu for this campaign.
- Open Bidding exploration, and then click the tick box next to Allow Smart Bidding to explore new traffic.
- Note: By default, bidding exploration will lower your effective target ROAS by up to 10%. For example, if your target ROAS is 200% and you choose a 10% ROAS tolerance, the effective average target ROAS will now be 180%. Select allowlisted customers will have options to further customise the allowable ROAS beyond 10%.
- Click Save.
.Note: To disable Exploration, follow the same steps above and untick the tick box.
Measure performance (reporting)
The bid strategy report will now include a timeline annotation to show when bidding exploration was active.
It will also include traffic diversity as a new metric, to reflect how many impressions were driven by unique search categories.
A search category refers to a unique subset of queries grouped together based on user intent, with meaningful semantic differentiation, compared to raw queries which would include misspellings, plurals and other variations. Traffic diversity should be the key metric used to evaluate success for this beta feature.
How to determine if bidding exploration was successful
During the beta, the best way to measure the impact of Exploration is through a campaign experiment.
- Use the Experiments UI to measure incremental performance (cost, conversions, conversion value, etc)
- Use the bid strategy report to compare traffic diversity
Experiment best practices
- Turn on Experiment sync. Keep all variables between the trial and control arm constant. Enabling bidding exploration within campaign settings should be the only variable that is different from the base campaign.
- Don’t attempt to test new bid strategies or targeting concurrently.
- Wait 2–3 conversion cycles for control and trial arms to reach performance and spend parity before turning on bidding exploration.
- Don’t make major adjustments after you have opted in. Don’t adjust the target ROAS.
- Enable bidding exploration in the trial arm.
FAQs
What is the difference between lowering ROAS target and turning on Exploration?
Lowering ROAS targets will generally increase bids uniformly across all matched queries. This often doesn’t significantly increase traffic diversity
By contrast, enabling bidding exploration will directly inform the Smart Bidding algorithms to bid higher in order to find new sources of traffic, such as queries.
How long should I enable bidding exploration for?
It’s strongly recommended that you enable bidding exploration for 2–6 weeks initially, though some advertisers may wish to keep it on indefinitely.
Does my campaign need to use 100% broad match keywords in order to be eligible for bidding exploration?
It’s acceptable to have other match types in the campaign too, but we strongly recommend that the majority of the campaign traffic is either going through broad match or Dynamic Search Ads. These targeting types will give the best performance outcome along with bidding exploration.
What if I enable bidding exploration in a campaign that isn’t using broad match or DSA?
Exploration works best on broad match and DSA, as there is a clear opportunity to expand to queries already being targeted. If a campaign is only using exact match, bidding exploration will be more limited in its ability to identify new sources of traffic.
What if I’m a Search Ads 360 user?
For the current beta, bidding exploration can only be enabled within the Google Ads UI.
After I have turned off bidding exploration, will Smart Bidding retain what it learned?
Yes. Smart Bidding will always learn from available historical data.
What if I raise my ROAS target by around 10% and then enable bidding exploration? Will I make use of the volume benefits without sacrificing ROAS performance?
This approach is discouraged, as it will limit bidding exploration’s ability to increase traffic diversity. By increasing ROAS targets while simultaneously enabling bidding exploration, there will be fewer opportunities for the algorithm to identify new high-performing traffic.
I’m interested in a ROAS allowance of higher or lower than 10%, what is the plan for this case?
Advertisers who have tested bidding exploration with the 10% ROAS tolerance may be eligible for a separate allowlist feature that supports variable ROAS tolerance. Reach out to your Google account team if you’re interested in this.
Is bidding exploration available for Maximise conversion value, without a target ROAS?
No. Maximise conversion value is intended for users who have a limited daily budget. Bidding exploration is intended for users with flexible budgets who are comfortable with accepting a lower ROAS in order to increase traffic diversity and scale performance.
Will Exploration be made available for Maximise conversion value, without a target ROAS?
No. Max conversion value is intended for users who have a limited daily budget. Exploration is intended for users with uncapped budgets who are comfortable with accepting a lower ROAS in order to scale performance. This feature will not be relevant for Max conversion value which doesn’t use a target.
Will bidding exploration work with data exclusions?
Yes. In the event that performance is impacted by a conversion outage and you need to apply a data exclusion, doing so will work in a similar way to a search campaign that doesn’t have bidding exploration enabled.
Is bidding exploration compatible with seasonal adjustments?
Yes.
