About Smart Bidding for store sales

This article explains how Smart Bidding works for Store Sales (for Search and Shopping campaigns). If you are interested in Smart Bidding for Store Sales for Performance Max Campaigns, refer to Create a Performance Max campaign.

About store sales conversions

If sales at your physical locations are important to your business, you can use conversion tracking to help you understand how your ads influence store sales. Learn more about how to View your store sales conversions.

How to value a store sale

If you’re receiving dynamic store sales values through in-store transaction uploads or from automated dynamic values reporting, the Google Ads UI will provide you with your modeled store sales conversion value. However, if you’re not uploading or you’re only eligible to receive automated conversion counts, you can specify an average conversion value for your store sales conversions and the system will use this to provide your conversion value. Learn more about how to Set up your Google Ads account for store sales.

Whether you’re receiving store sales values automatically or via in-store transactions, we recommend specifying a static store sales conversion value that aligns with an average order value for your store sales. Setting up this static value is helpful if the system needs to fall back to using the static value instead of the dynamic values. By default, the static store sales conversion value is 1.

For example, if you’re uploading in-store transaction data but you stop uploading for some time, the system will use the static value until eligible uploads resume.

Set up Smart Bidding for store sales in your campaigns

Bid strategies supported

For Search campaigns, Smart Bidding to store sale conversions is supported in fully automated bid strategies such as Target ROAS, Target CPA, Maximize Conversions, and Maximize Conversion Value. Learn more about determining a bid strategy based on your goals

If you want to optimize more for store sales conversions in your Search campaigns, use a value-based bid strategy and make sure store sale conversions have a higher relative value to other conversion actions. Bid strategies that optimize for conversion volume (like Target CPA or Maximize Conversions) treat each conversion action with equal importance. Learn more about conversion values

For Shopping campaigns, Smart Bidding to store sales conversions is supported by Target ROAS bidding.Learn more about using optimize bidding while creating Local campaigns

For Performance Max campaigns, Smart Bidding to store sales conversions is supported in fully automated bid strategies such as Target ROAS, Target CPA, Maximize Conversions, and Maximize Conversion Value. Learn more about using optimize bidding while creating Performance Max campaigns.

Include in "Conversions"

1. Set your store sales conversion goal as an account-default goal (recommended)

By setting your store sales conversion goal as an account-default goal, Smart Bidding strategies that optimize for conversions in that account will start optimizing towards it. If the conversion is owned by a manager account level, that setting will apply to all campaigns using Smart Bidding in client accounts which are opted into tracking conversions under that manager account. It’s recommended to set your store sales conversion goal as account-default whenever possible because the best overall performance is achieved by optimizing for the same set of conversions across all campaigns. Note that we recommend including store sales in all existing conversion-based bid strategies for best performance.

Set store sales conversion goal as account-default:

1. In your Google Ads account, click the Goals icon .
2. Click the Conversions drop down in the section menu.
3. Click Summary.
4. Identify the "Store sales" conversion action.
5. Click Edit goal.
6. Select Use as an account goal.
7. Select the conversion actions you'd like to use for reporting and bidding as "Primary".
8. Click Save changes.
9. Select Edit Settings.
10. Check the box next to "Include in 'Conversions'" and click Save.

2. Set your store sales conversion goal at the campaign level

This setting allows you to choose the conversion actions that will be reported in “Conversions” and used for bid optimization at the campaign-level. The campaign conversion setting allows you to override your account-default goals and specify which goals you’d like to track in your conversion reporting and use for bidding in a particular campaign. Using the campaign-level conversion setting is recommended as an interim solution if you have existing bid strategies that optimize for conversions and would prefer to test and scale adoption of bidding to store sales throughout the account over time.

Set up campaign-level conversion setting for Search campaigns:

1. In your Google Ads account, click the Campaigns icon .
2. Click the Campaigns drop down in the section menu.
3. Click Campaigns.
4. Click the Settings tab at the top of the page.
5. Go to the Workspace bar at the top.
6. Click the Workspace drop down menu and select Search campaigns.
7. Select the campaign you want to opt into store sales bidding.
8. Click on Additional settings.
9. Click Goals.
10. Click Use Campaign-specific goal settings.
11. Select the Store sales conversion goal in addition to other conversion goals you would like to optimize for and click Save.

To make any changes to the static account-level store sales conversion value:

1. In your Google Ads account, click the Goals icon .
2. Click the Conversions drop down in the section menu.
3. Click Summary.
4. Click the Store sales conversion action that you want to edit.
5. Click Edit settings. You can now make changes to the “Store sales” conversion action.
6. Click the Value section and update the static value in the field. We recommend providing a value which reflects the average order value of your sales, as this will help provide better insights when evaluating store sales data.
   • Note: If you’re receiving automatic store sales values, then the static value won’t be used. If you’re uploading in-store transaction data, then the static value will only be used if you stop uploading eligible in-store transaction data after a period of time.

Best practices

• Advertisers should upload in-store transaction data regularly (daily is recommended, but weekly at a minimum) to help Smart Bidding operate effectively.
• For advertisers who upload data, the system can forecast store sales value data for up to 30 days from the last upload. This means missing 1 to 2 uploads shouldn’t negatively impact the bidding system. However, we still strongly encourage you to upload consistently to help Smart Bidding operate effectively. Learn more about how to Upload your store sales data.
• You can find out how long it takes for your customers to convert by adding predefined store sales columns and clicking on the ”days to conversion” segment. We recommend using a 7-day store sale conversion window for best performance and evaluation with Smart Bidding. However, for specific business models that require a longer conversion window due to longer purchase cycles, it’s possible to keep the 30-day conversion window. Note that when using a 30-day window, it will take longer after implementation to correctly evaluate the performance of Smart Bidding with store sales.
• Keep in mind that changes to conversion settings apply going forward only. When you first include store sales in “Conversions”, historical values in conversion columns won’t reflect the current setting. It’s best to calculate CPA and ROAS targets manually by incorporating historical data from at least a 30-day period before the conversion delay into the following formulas:
  • CPA target = cost / (all biddable conversions + store sales)
  • ROAS target = (conversion value of all biddable conversions + store sales * current conversion value per store sale) * 100 / cost

• For ROAS targets in Performance Max campaigns, follow the best practice above for ROAS targets, unless:
  • You’re not using the optional ROAS target: No action is required.
  • You’re using the ROAS target only as a safety mechanism (your ROAS target is set higher than your achieved ROAS): Consider setting the new ROAS target also higher than the number recommended above.

Cost impact for adding conversions or conversion value to target-based Smart Bidding strategies

Adding store sales to the conversions used for bidding may cause your Target CPA and Target ROAS strategies to spend more to continue achieving your targets. To maintain stable spend, follow the above suggestions to identify and update targets. If you want to further ensure that spend is stable, you can decrease your CPA target or increase your ROAS target once you include store sales in “Conversions”.