Use data exclusions to prevent conversion tracking issues from impacting your Smart Bidding

Smart Bidding uses conversions and conversion value data in Google Ads to help meet your goals. If you have any issues with conversion tracking, you can use data exclusions to prevent any unintended changes in your conversions from affecting Smart Bidding.

How it works

Data exclusions is an advanced tool that tells Smart Bidding to ignore all data from dates when there were issues with your conversion tracking.

Conversion issues that may affect Smart Bidding include anything that causes reported conversions or conversion value in Google Ads to be incorrect. For example:

• Tagging issues
• Website outages

Data exclusions for Smart Bidding is available for Search, Display and Shopping campaigns. 

Instructions

1. Sign in to your Google Ads account
2. Click the tools icon .
3. Under “Shared library,” select Bid strategies.
4. Click Advanced controls and select Data exclusions.
5. Click   New data exclusion.
6. Next to “Settings,” enter a name and description.
7. Enter the start date and time and end date and time for the data you’d like to exclude. Since conversions can be attributed to clicks in the past, select a date range that accounts for the typical conversion delay.
8. Next to "Scope," select campaigns and devices for this adjustment. You can select individual campaigns to exclude or the entire account.
9. Select devices to exclude. For example, the conversion issue may only have affected mobile tracking.
10. Click Save and select Create data exclusion.

Remove data exclusion

Once the data exclusion is live, you’ll see the status as “Active.” You can remove a data exclusion to incorporate the conversion data into Smart Bidding.

What to know about data exclusions

Keep these best practices and key points in mind when using data exclusions:

• Applies to clicks: Your data exclusions will exclude clicks that would have had the broken conversions attributed to them. When these clicks are excluded, the associated conversions are also excluded.
• Exclude dates before conversions occur: If there is typically a delay between when your customers click on an ad and when they convert, exclude additional dates before the conversion tracking issue occurred.
• Applies to all campaign types: If you applied an exclusion for the entire account, conversions for Search, Display, and Shopping Network campaigns will be excluded.
• Doesn’t affect conversion reporting: Data exclusions only affect the data that Smart Bidding uses, you’ll still see these excluded conversions in your reporting.