If you've ever noticed that adjusting your ACOS Limit or Bid Modifier doesn't always lead to immediate bid changes, you might be experiencing the "bid exploration" phase. This is when our Predictive AI takes a conservative approach to raising bids, gradually increasing them over time. This guide will help you understand why this happens and offer some tips to speed up the process of bid exploration.
Why Bid Exploration Happens
Bid exploration is designed to keep your campaigns efficient by limiting the rate at which bids can increase within a 24-hour period. Several factors can influence how quickly bids adjust:
Bid Increase Rate: The bidder limits the rate of bid increase to prevent sudden spikes.
User Max-Bid Setting: For external campaigns, if you've set a maximum bid, it might prevent bids from rising quickly.
Conversion Rate Fluctuations: Random changes in conversion rate or average order value can affect bid changes.
How to Speed Up Bid Exploration
If you want to accelerate the bid exploration process, here are some steps you can take:
Increase Your Max-Bid Setting For External campaigns, If your max-bid setting is too low, it might be limiting the bid increases. Try raising your max bids and see if it helps align your campaign performance with your ACOS target.
Temporarily Adjust the Ad Group Min-Bid Setting For low-click or no-click targets, the bidder is likely in bid exploration mode. For external campaigns, to move things along faster, you can temporarily increase the ad group min-bid setting for about one hour. This will reset all bids to the new min-bid value, allowing exploration to continue from there.
Suggested Min-Bid Setting Formula:
min_bid = ACOS Limit * 0.10 * Average_Order_Value.This sets the min-bid at a 10% conversion rate, which is fairly optimistic but should accelerate bid exploration.
Increase ACOS Limit For Smart Campaigns to increase your bidding within an ad group we suggest setting a higher ACOS Limit. This informs the bidder your would like to be more aggressive with your bidding. Increasing this setting for 24 hours will allow the bidder to increase bids and increase your impressions and clicks on all keywords.
Track Your Changes After making adjustments, give the AI some time to process and track the changes. Check after about 30 minutes to see if the bid changes align with your expectations.
Bid exploration is an important process that helps maintain the efficiency of your campaigns. However, if you need to speed things up, these tips can help. Remember, gradual adjustments are usually best to avoid overspending or underperforming. If you have any questions or need additional guidance, our support team is here to help.