Excluding Data from Google Ads tCPA Bidding Algorithms
Ideally, nothing ever goes wrong with your Google Ads account or website, but we all know that isn’t reality. If you’ve ever had your website go down, and you’re on tCPA (or any other ‘smart bidding’ option), you are also more then likely bracing for the 2nd issue that’s about to come after the website issues are resolved, which is Google Ads reacting to this few hours/days/week of bad performance data. If you’re on tCPA, Google will start bidding much lower than it used to, which will greatly affect your account’s click and conversion volume.
Luckily, there is a way to exclude data from your account so Google’s algorithm can ignore conversion data for tCPA. The data must be excluded by your Google rep. Most likely your rep won’t be aware of this feature, but it’s simply called “Data Exclusions.” Send them an email and see if they can figure it out. All you need to do is provide the requested date range for exclusion and your rep will do the rest. If you don’t have a rep, you can call 1-866-2-Google.
I believe the most granular exclusion timeframe you can get is a full day period, but still be sure to ‘pad’ a bit in the front and the back of the date range so you don’t accidently get a few hours or minutes of bad data.
Removing this conversion data will basically tell the algorithm to ‘pretend like a timeframe never happened’, and you won’t see the decreases to CPC bids that you’re accustomed to after site issues. But, all your reports will still show conversion data as normal; this is simply a request for tCPA to ignore data, not remove it from the system.
You should only need to make these requests if you experience website issues or make some very large Google Ads specific faux paus. Another use cause would be excluding outlier data for areas of very strong performance, such as a blitz sale or holiday performance. Really, any very large outlier data set should be considered for exclusion. If you’re simply adding, deleting, or adjusting your conversion events, then Google’s algorithm will recognize these changes and restart its learning period without intervention from the Google rep.
Hopefully this short and sweet blog can save you a lot of coin! If you have any questions about tCPA, you can read more on my guest on the CallTrackingMetrics Blog or “Ask Four15 Digital” a question.
