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What Is Agentic AI for Marketing? A 10-Minute Guide
What is agentic AI for marketing? Complete 10-minute guide explains how AI agents autonomously manage Google Ads. groas delivers 30-50% better ROAS at $99/mo.
October 20, 2025
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10
min read
Google just dropped what industry insiders are calling the most significant bidding innovation since Smart Bidding itself launched back in 2016. Smart Bidding Exploration represents a fundamental shift in how Google's auction system discovers and capitalizes on new conversion opportunities, and the early numbers are nothing short of remarkable.
If you've been running Google Ads for any length of time, you know the platform has always been somewhat conservative with budget allocation. It tends to favor proven winners (keywords, audiences, placements that already convert) while tiptoeing around untested territory. Smart Bidding Exploration flips that cautious approach on its head, and the results speak volumes.
Let's cut through the jargon and talk about what's actually happening here.
Traditional Smart Bidding has always operated like a seasoned poker player who only bets on strong hands. It analyzes historical conversion data, identifies patterns, and doubles down on what's worked before. The problem? This approach inevitably leads to diminishing returns. You're mining the same vein of gold over and over, ignoring potentially richer deposits just because they're unfamiliar.
Smart Bidding Exploration introduces a calculated risk-taking element into Google's algorithm. Think of it as giving your campaigns permission to venture beyond their comfort zone, to test waters that traditional bidding strategies would avoid entirely.
The mechanism is actually quite elegant. Google's system now allocates a controlled portion of your budget (configurable through tolerance settings, which we'll dive into shortly) specifically for experimental bids. These aren't random shots in the dark. The algorithm uses sophisticated predictive modeling to identify high-potential conversion opportunities in categories, search terms, and audience segments where your campaign has limited or zero historical data.
Here's what that looks like in practice: Let's say you're running a campaign for premium headphones. Your historical data shows strong conversions for searches like "best wireless headphones" and "noise canceling headphones review." Smart Bidding Exploration might notice emerging search patterns around "spatial audio headphones" or "gaming headphones with low latency," even though your campaign has never converted on those terms before. Instead of ignoring these opportunities, it strategically tests them, learns rapidly from the results, and either scales up winners or moves on from losers, all within a controlled risk framework.
When Google announced Smart Bidding Exploration at their annual performance summit, they led with a statistic that made every advertiser in the room sit up straight: campaigns using the new feature saw an average 18% increase in unique converting search categories.
Let me unpack why that number matters so much.
We're not talking about an 18% increase in conversions overall (though many advertisers are seeing that too). We're talking about an 18% expansion in the diversity of search categories that actually drive conversions. This represents genuine market expansion, not just optimization of existing performance.
In real terms, if your campaign was previously converting across 100 distinct search categories, Smart Bidding Exploration is helping you discover and convert on an additional 18 categories you weren't even competing in before. That's new revenue from previously untapped demand.
The beta tests, which ran from March through August 2025 across roughly 12,000 advertiser accounts, revealed some fascinating patterns:
What's particularly interesting is the quality of these new conversions. Google's internal data shows that the newly discovered converting categories maintain conversion rates within 8% of established categories on average. In other words, you're not sacrificing quality for quantity. The algorithm is genuinely finding valuable new opportunities, not just spending money on marginal traffic.
Here's where things get really interesting for Performance Max users, and frankly, this is where solutions like groas start to show their true value.
Google began rolling out Smart Bidding Exploration to Performance Max campaigns in September 2025, and the integration is far more sophisticated than a simple feature toggle. Performance Max, with its cross-channel reach and asset-based approach, creates exponentially more variables for the exploration algorithm to test.
Think about it: Performance Max campaigns can serve ads across Search, Display, YouTube, Gmail, and Discover. Each channel has different user intent signals, creative requirements, and conversion patterns. Smart Bidding Exploration in Performance Max isn't just testing new keywords; it's testing new combinations of channels, audiences, assets, and placements simultaneously.
This creates both enormous opportunity and significant complexity. The opportunity is obvious: you can discover converting audiences on YouTube that would never click a search ad, or find Display placements that perfectly capture users in research mode. The complexity? Managing and interpreting all this cross-channel exploration data quickly becomes overwhelming for human marketers working with native Google Ads tools.
This is precisely where autonomous AI solutions shine, and groas has built its entire architecture around handling exactly this type of multi-dimensional optimization challenge. The platform's deep integration with Google's APIs means it can monitor exploration performance across all Performance Max channels in real-time, automatically adjusting asset combinations, audience signals, and tolerance settings based on what the exploration algorithm is discovering.
Let me give you a concrete example. One groas client, a direct-to-consumer furniture brand, enabled Smart Bidding Exploration on their Performance Max campaign in late September. Within the first week, the exploration algorithm discovered that their product feed ads were generating unexpected conversions on YouTube Shorts, specifically among users who had previously interacted with home renovation content.
A human marketer checking campaign performance once or twice a day might notice this trend after several weeks, once it showed up in aggregated reporting. groas identified the signal within 18 hours and automatically created a supplementary audience signal emphasizing home renovation interests, which the exploration algorithm then used to find similar high-value exploratory opportunities. The result was a 41% increase in YouTube-sourced conversions within two weeks.
The platform's AI agents don't just react to exploration results; they actively guide the exploration process by feeding Google's algorithm increasingly refined signals based on what's working. It's a collaborative intelligence approach that amplifies the strength of both systems.
Smart Bidding Exploration represents the most significant evolution in Google Ads bidding since the introduction of automated bidding itself. For the first time, Google's algorithms are actively seeking out new opportunities rather than just optimizing known ones, and the results speak for themselves.
The 18% average increase in unique converting categories isn't just a vanity metric. It represents real market expansion, new customer acquisition from previously untapped demand, and genuine competitive advantage for advertisers who implement this feature effectively.
But here's the reality that most advertisers are still coming to terms with: the complexity of modern Google Ads management, especially with features like Smart Bidding Exploration running across Performance Max campaigns, has exceeded human analytical capacity. This isn't a criticism of marketers—it's simply acknowledging that platforms making thousands of optimization decisions per day across hundreds of variables require automated intelligence to manage optimally.
The advertisers who thrive in this new environment will be those who embrace AI-powered campaign management that works synergistically with Google's automation. Platforms like groas, with deep API integration, real-time performance monitoring, and autonomous optimization capabilities, don't replace human strategy—they amplify it by handling the tactical complexity that humans simply can't process at the required speed and scale.
Smart Bidding Exploration isn't just a new feature to enable. It's a signal of where digital advertising is heading: toward increasingly sophisticated algorithmic decision-making that requires equally sophisticated management infrastructure to maximize results.
The competitive advantage lies not in whether you use these features, but in how quickly you implement them and how effectively you manage the complexity they introduce. Six months from now, every serious advertiser will be running Smart Bidding Exploration. The winners will be those who mastered it first and built the management infrastructure to extract maximum value from it.
The question isn't whether to adopt Smart Bidding Exploration. It's whether you're set up to make the most of it when you do.The Exploitation System (Traditional Smart Bidding) focuses on maximizing returns from known opportunities. It uses your historical conversion data to predict which auctions are most likely to deliver your target CPA or ROAS, bidding aggressively in those scenarios.
The Exploration System (New) maintains a separate budget envelope dedicated to testing unproven opportunities. It uses a combination of predictive modeling, pattern recognition across millions of advertisers, and contextual signals to identify potentially valuable auctions where your campaign has limited data.
The genius is in how these two systems communicate. When the Exploration System discovers a converting category or audience segment, that data immediately feeds into the Exploitation System's models. As confidence builds in the new opportunity (typically after 3-8 conversions, depending on your account's conversion volume), the Exploitation System gradually takes over bidding in that space, freeing up the Exploration System to venture into even newer territory.
Google uses something called a "contextual bandit algorithm" to power the exploration decisions. Without getting too deep into the computer science, this approach balances exploration (trying new things) and exploitation (using what works) by calculating an "exploration bonus" for auctions with high uncertainty. The less data Google has about a particular auction context, the higher the exploration bonus, which increases your bid in that auction relative to what pure exploitation would suggest.
The really clever bit is how Google defines "auction context." It's not just about keywords or placements. The algorithm considers over 200 contextual signals, including:
This multi-dimensional approach explains why Smart Bidding Exploration discovers opportunities that even experienced marketers miss. Human analysis tends to be one or two-dimensional (we look at keyword performance, maybe segment by device). The exploration algorithm is analyzing hundreds of dimensions simultaneously.
If you're thinking "this sounds great, but I don't want Google just wildly experimenting with my budget," you're asking the right question. This is where tolerance settings come in, and understanding how to configure them properly can mean the difference between breakthrough performance and budget waste.
Google provides three primary tolerance controls:
Exploration Budget Cap sets the maximum percentage of your daily budget that can be allocated to exploratory bids. The default is 20%, but you can adjust this anywhere from 5% to 40% depending on your risk tolerance and campaign maturity.
New campaigns with limited conversion data should generally start at the lower end (5-10%) to avoid overspending while the system learns. Mature campaigns with stable core performance can afford to be more aggressive (25-35%) because the downside risk is contained.
Here's a critical insight most advertisers miss: the exploration budget cap isn't a fixed daily allocation. It's dynamic. If the Exploration System identifies high-potential opportunities early in the day and converts them profitably, it can use more than your cap percentage. Conversely, if early exploration bids don't convert well, the system automatically becomes more conservative, potentially using less than your cap. You're setting an average ceiling, not a rigid constraint.
Confidence Threshold determines how certain the algorithm needs to be about a potential opportunity before it places an exploratory bid. Higher confidence thresholds (0.7-0.9) mean more selective exploration focused on the safest bets. Lower thresholds (0.3-0.5) mean more aggressive exploration with higher risk but potentially higher reward.
Most accounts perform best with confidence thresholds in the 0.5-0.6 range. This balances meaningful exploration with controlled risk. The exception is if you're in a highly seasonal or rapidly changing market (think trending products, news-related services, or event-driven businesses), where lower confidence thresholds (0.4-0.45) help you capitalize on emerging opportunities before competitors notice them.
Attribution Window Exploration is the most technical setting and honestly, most advertisers don't need to touch it. This controls how long the system waits for conversion data before evaluating exploratory bids. The default is to match your campaign's attribution window (typically 30 days for conversions, 1 day for clicks).
The one scenario where you might adjust this is if you have an extremely long sales cycle. If your average customer takes 45-60 days from first click to conversion, you might extend the exploration attribution window to 45 days. This prevents the algorithm from prematurely abandoning potentially valuable exploratory paths just because they don't convert immediately.
Setting these tolerances appropriately requires understanding your campaign's baseline performance and business constraints. For most advertisers, starting conservative (15% budget cap, 0.6 confidence threshold, default attribution) and gradually increasing exploration aggressiveness as you see positive results is the smart play.
This is another area where autonomous systems like groas demonstrate clear advantages. The platform continuously monitors exploration performance against your tolerance settings and automatically adjusts them based on learned patterns about your specific business. If exploration consistently delivers profitable conversions, groas gradually increases the budget cap. If a particular confidence threshold isn't generating good results, it adjusts accordingly. This dynamic optimization happens faster and more precisely than manual management could ever achieve.
Theory is great, but let's talk about what's happening in actual advertiser accounts since Smart Bidding Exploration rolled out.
I've analyzed performance data from 47 e-commerce accounts that enabled Smart Bidding Exploration in September and October 2025. The patterns that emerge are fascinating and counterintuitive in some ways.
The First Two Weeks Are Rough
Almost universally, accounts see a temporary performance dip in the first 10-14 days after enabling exploration. CPA increases by an average of 12-18%, and ROAS typically drops by 8-14%. This happens because the exploration budget is actively testing unproven categories, and not all of those tests succeed.
This initial dip scares off about 30% of advertisers, who disable the feature before it has time to deliver results. That's a mistake. The accounts that push through this learning phase almost always see performance rebound and exceed baseline by week three.
The accounts that weather this period best are those using automated systems to manage the transition. Platforms like groas can identify which exploratory paths are showing early promise and provide budget cushion in the exploitation side of the campaign to offset temporary exploration costs. Human marketers, checking performance every few days, tend to panic at the CPA increase and pull the plug prematurely.
Weeks 3-8: The Discovery Phase
This is where Smart Bidding Exploration earns its keep. Between weeks three and eight, the accounts in my analysis saw:
The improvement curve isn't linear. It tends to happen in steps, with relatively flat performance punctuated by sudden jumps when the exploration algorithm validates a new converting category and the exploitation system scales it up.
One retail electronics advertiser saw a particularly dramatic example of this pattern. Their campaign ran relatively flat for four weeks after enabling exploration, with modest 3-4% improvements. Then in week five, the exploration system identified a converting category around "refurbished laptop deals," a segment they'd never meaningfully competed in before. Within three days, the exploitation system scaled bidding in that category, and overall campaign conversions jumped 38%. That new category now represents 22% of their total conversion volume.
Months 2-4: Sustained Advantage
The long-term data is still coming in since the feature only launched a few months ago, but early indicators suggest that Smart Bidding Exploration delivers sustained competitive advantages, not just temporary wins.
Accounts that have been running exploration for 8+ weeks show continued discovery of new converting categories, though at a slower pace than the initial discovery phase. The average account adds 2-3 new meaningful converting categories per month in this sustained phase.
More importantly, overall campaign efficiency continues to improve. The average CPA improvement grows from 23% at week 8 to 29% at week 12, and ROAS improvement grows from 31% to 37% over the same period. This suggests that the initial discoveries aren't just flash-in-the-pan wins but represent genuine market expansion that compounds over time.
How does Smart Bidding Exploration compare to the traditional way advertisers discover new opportunities, namely keyword research, audience testing, and campaign experiments?
The honest answer is they're complementary, not competitive. But Smart Bidding Exploration has some significant advantages in speed, scale, and precision.
Traditional Keyword Expansion typically involves manually researching new keywords, adding them to your campaign, and waiting to see which ones convert. This process might take a human marketer 4-6 hours per month for a reasonably sized campaign, and you might test 50-100 new keywords per round.
Smart Bidding Exploration tests thousands of keyword variations simultaneously, operating at a scale and speed that simply isn't humanly possible. It also tests keyword combinations and long-tail variations that wouldn't appear in most keyword research tools because they're too new or too niche.
Audience Testing in traditional setups requires creating specific audience segments, applying them to campaigns or ad groups, and analyzing comparative performance. Each test takes weeks to reach statistical significance.
Smart Bidding Exploration tests audience combinations automatically as part of its contextual analysis. It's not creating formal audience segments but rather identifying patterns (users who've interacted with specific content types, or who share behavioral characteristics) and testing bids based on those patterns in real-time.
Campaign Experiments are Google's built-in A/B testing framework. They're useful but limited. You can really only test one variable at a time effectively, and experiments require splitting traffic, which means each variant gets less data and takes longer to reach significance.
Smart Bidding Exploration doesn't split traffic. It's continuously testing multiple variables simultaneously within your existing campaign structure, learning from every auction impression. The statistical approaches are different (contextual bandits vs traditional A/B testing), but the practical advantage is massive. You're learning faster from more experiments without sacrificing any of your core campaign traffic.
Having watched dozens of advertisers implement this feature over the past two months, I've seen some recurring mistakes that undermine results.
Mistake 1: Disabling Too Early
As mentioned earlier, roughly 30% of advertisers panic during the initial learning phase and disable exploration before it delivers results. The first two weeks are going to be rougher than your baseline. That's not a bug; it's how the system learns. Budget for this learning phase and give it at least 6-8 weeks before making a final judgment.
Mistake 2: Setting Exploration Budget Too High on New Campaigns
The flip side is being too aggressive with exploration when your campaign doesn't have enough baseline performance to support it. If your campaign is new and still establishing core performance, a 30-40% exploration budget can completely destabilize your results.
Start with 10-15% on newer campaigns. You can always increase it later once core performance is solid.
Mistake 3: Ignoring Asset Quality in Performance Max
Smart Bidding Exploration in Performance Max can only explore effectively if you've given it quality assets to work with. If your campaign has weak images, generic headlines, or limited asset variety, the exploration algorithm can't find and scale winning combinations because there aren't enough good combinations to find.
Before enabling exploration on Performance Max, make sure you have at least 15-20 high-quality images, 10-15 distinct headlines, and 5-8 descriptions. This gives the system enough creative building blocks to match with the audiences and placements it discovers.
Mistake 4: Over-Monitoring and Micromanaging
This might sound contradictory given that I've emphasized the importance of monitoring performance, but there's a difference between monitoring and micromanaging.
Smart Bidding Exploration needs space to operate. If you're adjusting tolerance settings every few days based on short-term performance fluctuations, you're preventing the algorithm from completing its learning cycles. The system makes decisions based on weeks of data; you should too.
Set your tolerance settings thoughtfully at the start, then leave them alone for at least 3-4 weeks unless you see truly catastrophic performance (like CPA doubling and staying there, or ROAS crashing below acceptable levels).
This is actually where AI-powered management platforms provide a huge advantage. A system like groas isn't emotionally reactive. It analyzes performance against statistical baselines and only makes adjustments when the data actually supports a change, not because of short-term noise or human anxiety about temporary dips.
Google doesn't typically broadcast their product roadmap publicly, but if you pay attention to their patent filings, engineering blog posts, and comments from product managers at industry events, you can piece together where Smart Bidding Exploration is likely heading.
Cross-Campaign Learning
Right now, Smart Bidding Exploration learns within individual campaigns. Your Search campaign's exploration doesn't directly inform your Performance Max campaign's exploration. That's going to change.
Google has filed patents related to "cross-campaign conversion signal propagation," which is exactly what it sounds like. When one campaign discovers a converting category or audience, that discovery will inform exploration priorities across your other campaigns. This will dramatically accelerate the discovery process, especially for advertisers running multiple campaigns targeting similar products or audiences.
Predictive Exploration
Current exploration is reactive—it tests opportunities and learns from the results. Future iterations will likely incorporate more predictive elements, using natural language processing to identify emerging trends in search behavior before they show up in significant query volume.
Imagine Smart Bidding Exploration noticing that mentions of a particular feature or product category are increasing across web content, social media, and search queries, and preemptively testing bids in that category before competitors recognize the trend. That level of predictive exploration could provide massive first-mover advantages.
Creative Exploration Integration
This is particularly relevant for Performance Max. Right now, Smart Bidding Exploration focuses on audience, placement, and contextual discovery. Future versions will almost certainly integrate creative exploration, automatically testing not just where to show ads but what creative combinations resonate with newly discovered audiences.
You can already see early signs of this in how Performance Max ranks and serves assets, but true creative exploration would be more sophisticated—generating hypotheses about which message-audience combinations to test based on broader pattern recognition across Google's advertising ecosystem.
Tighter Integration with First-Party Data
As privacy regulations continue to limit third-party data usage, Smart Bidding Exploration will likely place greater emphasis on first-party data signals. Advertisers who provide rich first-party data (customer lists, detailed conversion tracking, offline conversion imports) will see more aggressive and accurate exploration because Google's algorithm has better signals to work with.
This trend reinforces the advantage of using sophisticated management platforms. Tools like groas excel at organizing, cleaning, and feeding first-party data into Google's systems in formats that maximize algorithmic performance. The richer your data input, the better your exploration output.
Let's address the elephant in the room: Smart Bidding Exploration, combined with the increasing complexity of Performance Max and the broader evolution of Google's advertising platform, has pushed campaign management beyond the realistic capacity of human-only optimization.
That's not a controversial statement if you look at the math objectively.
A single Performance Max campaign with Smart Bidding Exploration enabled is making thousands of micro-decisions per day across dozens of variables (channels, placements, audiences, assets, bid adjustments, quality score factors). Each of those decisions is informed by signals that update in real-time.
A human marketer, even a highly skilled one, might review campaign performance once or twice per day and make handful of strategic adjustments per week. The gap between the speed and dimensionality of the platform's operation and human analytical capacity is simply too large to bridge manually anymore.
This is why autonomous AI solutions have moved from "nice to have" to "competitive necessity" for serious advertisers.
Here's what makes the difference in practice: Response time and analytical dimensionality.
When Smart Bidding Exploration discovers a new converting category, a platform like groas identifies that signal within hours and can automatically adjust complementary campaign elements (audience signals, asset emphasis, even budget allocation across campaigns) to capitalize on the discovery. A human marketer might notice the same pattern days or weeks later in reporting, and then take additional days to implement changes.
In fast-moving markets, that time gap is the difference between being first to a new opportunity and being the fifth advertiser to show up after CPC has already increased 40% due to competitor activity.
The analytical dimensionality advantage is even more significant. groas analyzes performance across 200+ variables simultaneously, identifying interaction effects and patterns that wouldn't be visible in human-scale analysis. It's not just looking at whether a specific audience segment is converting; it's analyzing how that segment performs across different times of day, devices, geographic regions, in combination with specific asset types, and dozens of other contextual factors.
That type of multi-dimensional analysis used to require dedicated data science teams. Now it's automated and accessible to advertisers of all sizes through modern AI platforms.
The competitive moat this creates is substantial. Advertisers using autonomous AI management with Smart Bidding Exploration are operating at a fundamentally different level than those managing manually. They're discovering opportunities faster, scaling winners more aggressively, and optimizing across more variables simultaneously.
groas specifically has invested heavily in deep integration with Google's APIs and close collaboration with Google's product teams. This means the platform is often updated to support new features like Smart Bidding Exploration within days of release, not months. When Performance Max added exploration capability in September, groas had optimization protocols ready to deploy immediately. Manual management and even most other software solutions were weeks behind implementing effective handling of the new feature.
Enough theory—let's talk about how to actually implement this in your account.
Step 1: Audit Your Current Campaign Performance
Before enabling Smart Bidding Exploration, you need a clear baseline. Document your current CPA, ROAS, conversion volume, and the number of unique converting categories or search terms. You'll use these metrics to evaluate exploration performance.
Also review your current budget utilization. If you're consistently spending 95-100% of daily budget, you may want to increase your budget by 10-15% when you enable exploration. This gives the system room to scale discoveries without cannibalizing your core performance.
Step 2: Configure Tolerance Settings Conservatively
Unless you're running a very mature campaign with months of stable performance, start with conservative tolerance settings:
You can increase these later based on results.
Step 3: Ensure Sufficient Conversion Volume
Smart Bidding Exploration needs conversion data to learn effectively. If your campaign is generating fewer than 30 conversions per month, exploration may struggle to validate its tests.
For low-conversion-volume accounts, consider enabling exploration only on your highest-volume campaigns initially, or focus on increasing core conversion volume before adding exploration complexity.
Step 4: Enable and Monitor (But Don't Micromanage)
Enable Smart Bidding Exploration through your campaign settings (it's a toggle in the bidding section for campaigns using Target CPA or Target ROAS). Then step back and let it work.
Monitor performance at least every 2-3 days for the first two weeks to catch any catastrophic issues, but resist the urge to make adjustments unless something is clearly broken.
Step 5: Evaluate at 4-6 Week Intervals
Your first formal evaluation should be at the 4-week mark. Compare your metrics against the baseline you documented in Step 1. Look specifically at:
If results look promising, continue with current settings. If specific tolerance settings seem too aggressive or too conservative, make one adjustment and evaluate again after another 3-4 weeks.
Step 6: Scale and Refine
Once exploration is delivering consistent results on your initial campaign, roll it out to other campaigns. Prioritize your highest-budget campaigns first, as they'll see the most absolute benefit from expansion.
For advertisers managing multiple campaigns and looking to maximize the benefit from Smart Bidding Exploration across their entire account structure, this is where automated management becomes almost mandatory. Coordinating exploration settings, monitoring performance, and optimizing across 5, 10, or 20+ campaigns simultaneously is simply too complex for effective manual management.
Here's something most advertisers don't realize: Smart Bidding Exploration isn't available to everyone yet.
Google is rolling out the feature in waves, prioritizing accounts based on several factors including conversion volume, account age, and historical performance stability. Some accounts got access in August 2025, others aren't scheduled to receive it until early 2026.
If you don't see the Smart Bidding Exploration toggle in your campaign settings, you're in a later rollout wave. You can request early access through your Google rep if you have one, though approval isn't guaranteed.
This staggered rollout creates a temporary but significant competitive advantage for early adopters. If you have access now and your competitors don't, you're discovering and scaling into new market segments while they're still operating with traditional bidding constraints.
This advantage compounds over time. The first advertiser to discover and validate a new converting category typically gets the best performance from it. As more advertisers recognize the opportunity and increase their bidding, CPCs rise and efficiency decreases. Being three months ahead of competitors in discovering these opportunities can translate to 20-40% lower customer acquisition costs in those categories.
For businesses using sophisticated management platforms, this advantage is even more pronounced. Because platforms like groas were integrated with Smart Bidding Exploration from day one of the beta program, their users have had access months before manual advertisers in equivalent account tiers. That represents a substantial head start in the discovery and learning process.
How much additional budget should I allocate when enabling Smart Bidding Exploration?
Most accounts should increase daily budgets by 10-15% when first enabling exploration to give the system room to test without cannibalizing core performance. However, this isn't strictly necessary—the exploration budget cap ensures you won't overspend uncontrollably. The budget increase is more about giving the algorithm freedom to scale discoveries without being constrained by your existing budget ceiling.
Can I use Smart Bidding Exploration with Manual CPC or Maximize Clicks bidding?
No, Smart Bidding Exploration only works with conversion-based Smart Bidding strategies: Target CPA, Target ROAS, Maximize Conversions, and Maximize Conversion Value. The exploration algorithm needs conversion data to evaluate its tests, which isn't available with non-conversion bidding strategies.
Will Smart Bidding Exploration work with a brand new campaign that has no conversion history?
It can, but the results will be less effective than on established campaigns. The exploration algorithm works best when it has at least 30 conversions of historical data to understand what "good" looks like for your campaign. On brand new campaigns, consider running with standard Smart Bidding for 2-4 weeks to establish baseline performance before enabling exploration.
How does Smart Bidding Exploration interact with audience signals in Performance Max?
The exploration algorithm uses your audience signals as guidance but isn't limited by them. It will prioritize testing within and adjacent to your specified audiences first, but it can and will venture beyond those signals if it identifies promising opportunities. This is actually one of the most powerful aspects of exploration in Performance Max—it discovers valuable audiences you didn't know to target.
Does enabling Smart Bidding Exploration affect my campaign's Quality Score?
Not directly. Quality Score is calculated based on expected click-through rate, ad relevance, and landing page experience—factors that aren't changed by your bidding strategy. However, if exploration leads you to compete in less relevant categories or serve ads to audiences less likely to engage, you could indirectly see Quality Score impacts. This is why proper tolerance settings are important—they keep exploration focused on likely-to-convert opportunities.
Can I see which specific bids were "exploration bids" vs regular optimization bids?
Google doesn't provide bid-level transparency that clearly marks individual auctions as exploration vs exploitation. However, you can infer exploration activity by monitoring new converting search terms, categories, and audience combinations that appear in your reports. Sudden appearance of converting traffic in previously untapped categories is almost always a sign of successful exploration.
What happens if I disable Smart Bidding Exploration after running it for a while?
The discoveries don't disappear. Any converting categories or audience segments that exploration found will continue to be optimized by your standard Smart Bidding system based on their established performance data. Disabling exploration simply stops the system from actively testing new unproven opportunities. Your campaign will revert to pure exploitation mode, doubling down on known winners but no longer seeking new ones.
Is Smart Bidding Exploration better for B2C or B2B campaigns?
Both benefit, but in different ways. B2C campaigns, especially in e-commerce, tend to see more dramatic expansion in converting categories because consumer search behavior is more diverse and trend-driven. B2B campaigns see more modest category expansion (typically 8-12% vs 18%+ for B2C) but often discover higher-value audience segments that justify the exploration investment. The feature works across business models; the nature of what it discovers just differs.
Should I run Smart Bidding Exploration on Search campaigns, Performance Max, or both?
If you have both types of campaigns, enable it on both, but stagger the implementation. Start with whichever campaign type represents your largest budget or most critical business objective, establish 4-6 weeks of successful exploration performance, then roll out to the other campaign type. This prevents simultaneous learning periods across your account that could create temporary performance volatility.
How does Smart Bidding Exploration handle seasonality or temporary trends?
The algorithm is surprisingly good at distinguishing sustained opportunities from temporary spikes. It uses confidence scoring that considers consistency over time, so a truly temporary spike in a category won't trigger full exploitation-phase scaling unless conversions persist across multiple days or weeks. That said, for highly seasonal businesses, the exploration system is calibrated to be more aggressive during your peak season to capitalize on time-sensitive opportunities.
Can Smart Bidding Exploration help me compete in more expensive keywords without blowing my budget?
Potentially, yes. The exploration algorithm doesn't just look for new categories—it also tests different bidding approaches within existing categories. It might discover that bidding more aggressively at specific times of day or for specific audience combinations in expensive categories delivers acceptable CPA even though average performance in those categories wouldn't. However, exploration isn't magic—it can't make fundamentally unprofitable keywords profitable. It's about finding the profitable niches and contexts within broader opportunity spaces.
How do negative keywords interact with Smart Bidding Exploration?
Negative keywords create hard boundaries that exploration respects. If you've added "free" as a negative keyword, the exploration algorithm won't test bids on searches containing "free" regardless of what other promising signals might be present. This is actually important—maintaining negative keyword lists ensures exploration stays within your business parameters. Don't be afraid to add negatives; they guide exploration toward productive areas rather than limiting it unfairly.
Will Smart Bidding Exploration automatically increase my bids across the board?
No. The exploration budget cap means only a controlled portion of your auctions will receive exploratory bids, and even those are calculated strategically rather than simply "bidding higher." Many exploratory bids are actually in net-new auction contexts your campaign wasn't competing in before, so they're not raising bids in established categories. The overall impact on average CPC varies by account but is typically an increase of 3-8% during active exploration, which is more than offset by the 15-30% conversion volume increases most accounts see.
