by Austin LeClear
on October 24, 2025
If you’ve been poking around in your Google Ads accounts lately, you might’ve noticed something called “Smart Bidding Exploration” sitting there in beta.
When we first stumbled across this feature in campaign settings, we had no clue what it was. After diving deep into Google’s documentation and running some tests, we’re here to break it down — exploring the what, they why, and how it all works.
Prefer video? Check out Smart Bidding Exploration: Everything You Need to Know below:
Still with us? Good, let’s dive in.
What Is Smart Bidding Exploration, Really?
Smart bidding exploration is Google’s AI-powered feature designed to increase traffic diversity in your search campaigns.
But what does that actually mean? Well, when you’re using smart bidding strategies like Target ROAS (tROAS), Google’s bidding algorithm gets really good at knowing which search terms and audience segments will hit your goals. This is great, but it also creates a ceiling that limits your campaign performance.
Think of it like this – your campaign gets comfortable bidding on certain search queries that it knows will deliver your target ROAS. But there’s this whole universe of valuable traffic sitting just outside that comfort zone. Smart bidding exploration gives Google permission to test those waters without abandoning your performance goals.
How Smart Bidding Exploration Works
When you enable smart bidding exploration, you’re not just lowering your ROAS target across the board. Instead, you’re giving Google’s smart bidding a dual mandate:
- Keep hitting your original ROAS targets on the keywords and search categories that historically perform well
- Use a percentage of ROAS target tolerance (10-30%) to explore new traffic sources
Here’s what that setting looks like inside of a Google Ads account:
So, how does smart bidding exploration work? Let’s use a bullseye analogy:
Your current bidding strategy has you locked into the green center ring – that sweet spot where you consistently hit your conversion value goals. Without exploration, Google won’t venture into those outer rings because it might miss your targets. But with smart bidding exploration enabled, you’re asking Google to keep hitting the bullseye on what you know works, but to also use some of your budget to test those outer rings, too.
Smart Bidding Exploration vs. Lowering Your Bid Strategy
This is crucial to understand. If you just went into your campaign and lowered your Target ROAS from 200% to 180%, you’d be telling the bidding algorithm to aim for 180% on everything – including those bread-and-butter keywords that were crushing it at 200%. That’s not what we want.
Whereas, with smart bidding exploration, you maintain your aggressive ROAS performance on proven winners while the exploration phase tests new opportunities.
It’s like having your cake and eating it too – stable performance on what works, with controlled experimentation on what might work.
When Should You Enable Smart Bidding Exploration?
Not every campaign is a good fit for smart bidding exploration. Through testing, we’ve found this feature works best when:
- Your campaign is already performing well. This isn’t for brand new campaigns with limited data. You need historical data and consistent conversion tracking for Google’s systems to know what “good” looks like.
- Your campaign is not limited by budget. If your campaign is budget-constrained, just increase the budget. That’ll naturally let you enter more auctions without needing smart bidding exploration.
- You have room to grow. If you’re already capturing super high impression share, there’s probably not much left to explore. This feature shines when you feel plateaued, but know there’s more opportunity out there.
- You’re heading into a high-conversion period. Black Friday? Major sale? Peak season? This is when enabling exploration can really pay off. Higher conversion rates during these periods mean those exploratory bids are more likely to succeed.
Setting Up Smart Bidding Exploration
When you enable bidding exploration in your campaign settings, you’ll choose a tolerance level between 10% and 30%. Here’s how to think about it:
- 10% tolerance: Conservative approach for campaigns where you need to maintain strong ROAS performance
- 20% tolerance: Balanced approach for most situations
- 30% tolerance: Aggressive exploration for when you’re actively seeking to scale performance
Remember, this tolerance doesn’t mean your overall performance will drop by that percentage. It means Google can use that percentage of flexibility to test new audience segments and search terms while maintaining your targets on proven traffic.
Testing Smart Bidding Exploration Safely
Want to test smart bidding exploration without risking your whole campaign? Use campaign experiments. Split your traffic 50/50 between your base campaign and an experimental version with exploration enabled. This data-driven approach lets you monitor performance and see the actual impact before fully committing.
Watch your key metrics closely during the learning process. You’ll want to track:
- Overall ROAS performance (should stay close to target)
- Conversion volume changes
- Search terms report for new queries appearing
- Traffic diversity improvements
Final Thoughts
After using smart bidding exploration across multiple Google Ads accounts, here’s what we’ve learned: it’s not magic, but it’s genuinely useful for the right campaigns. Performance Max might get all the attention, but this quieter feature can unlock growth in mature search campaigns that traditional bidding strategies have maxed out.
The campaigns where we’ve seen the best results share common traits: they’ve been running for months with stable performance, they consistently hit their conversion value goals, and they had room in their markets for growth but seemed stuck.
Smart bidding exploration isn’t revolutionary, but it solves a real problem many advertisers face – how to grow beyond the constraints of rigid ROAS targets without sacrificing performance. By understanding that this feature maintains your performance on proven traffic while exploring new opportunities, you can use it strategically to break through plateaus and discover valuable traffic you’ve been missing.
Our advice? This feature is mainly for campaigns that are already working, not those that need fixing. Get your fundamentals right first, then use smart bidding exploration to push beyond your current limits.
