Data Exclusion

What Is a Data Exclusion?

If your conversion tracking goes down or measures incorrectly, Smart Bidding learns from bad data and degrades your campaign performance. Data exclusions prevent this damage by removing the affected time window from the optimization. Along with seasonality adjustments, they’re among the most important manual controls available for Smart Bidding strategies.

Data exclusions are a feature in Google Ads that instructs Smart Bidding not to use conversion data from a specific time period for bid optimization. This is necessary when your tracking data has been corrupted by technical issues and the algorithm would otherwise optimize based on flawed data.

Typical use cases: your conversion tag was broken for two days and captured no conversions. Without a data exclusion, Smart Bidding would think the conversion rate had collapsed and drastically cut bids. Or your tag double-counted conversions due to a bug, leading to inflated bids. Data exclusions are also the right tool during site outages, tracking migrations, or broken redirects.

For application: set data exclusions as quickly as possible, ideally before Smart Bidding processes the bad data. Define the time window precisely to the hours the issue existed. Unlike seasonality adjustments, which act prospectively, data exclusions can be applied retroactively. Note that Google recommends a maximum duration of 14 days. For longer tracking problems, you should consciously restart the bid strategy learning period by switching strategies.