When optimizing bids or bid adjustments to meet your goals, all conversion data and external account statistics, such as clicks and cost, are included in bid strategy calculations. If some of the conversion data is inaccurate or missing for a certain amount of time, you might want to exclude the data or time period from consideration.
You can identify the data that you want to exclude from a Search Ads 360 bid strategy by creating a Data Exclusion event in Search Ads 360. The events instruct your ROI bid strategies (bid strategies that optimize conversions and revenue) to exclude data when optimizing bids. Conversion goals will exclude the data when calculating bid adjustments.
Data exclusion events impact only bid strategies with conversions and revenue goals. Data exclusion events do not impact bid strategies with a position or clicks goal.
Data from the time period specified in the Data Exclusion event is not used when optimizing bids or bid adjustments, but the data is shown in the bid strategy reporting tables.
Search Ads 360 doesn't include conversion goal charts. The only way to determine if data is excluded from a conversion goal is to view a Data Exclusion event's settings.
Search Ads 360 excludes data for a minimum of 24 hours
When you create a data exclusion event, you can specify a time range that is anywhere from one hour to 14 days. However, although you can specify a time range that is less than 24 hours, Search Ads 360 will always exclude data for the entire 24 hours. Also note that when excluding data, Search Ads 360 converts your local time zone shown in the user interface into the engine time zone.
For example:
- If you specify a three-hour time range for an event in the United States Eastern Standard Time zone and the engine time zone is that located in London, England, Search Ads 360 will convert 1 July, 6:00 to 9:00 to the London engine account time zone, 1 July, 11:00 to 14:00, and exclude data for the entire 1 July date.
- If you specify a 24-hour period that is converted to 1 July, 24:00 to 2 July, 24:00, Search Ads 360 excludes data for the entire day of 1 July.
- If you specify a time period that is less than 24 hours but spans two days in the engine time zone, for example, 1 July, 3:00 to 2 July, 2:00, Search Ads 360 excludes data for two days.
- If you specify a time period that is more than 24 hours and spans two days, for example, 1 July, 3:00 to 2 July, 10:00, Search Ads 360 excludes data for two days.
Bid strategies continue to change bids during and after events
The Data Exclusion event is applied to all entities that are managed by the bid strategy such as campaigns, ad groups, product groups, and Shopping ads. The next time the bid strategy evaluates bids, the data from the event time period will be excluded. The bid strategy will use the remaining data to continue to evaluate and adjust bids.
Data exclusion events and auction-time bidding
In the new Search Ads 360, data exclusion events for Google Ads Auction-time bidding will be automatically applied over to Google Ads - no more creating multiple exclusion events over multiple platforms. To learn more about data exclusions in Google Ads for auction-time-enabled bid strategies, see Use data exclusions.