How & When to Use Data Exclusions in Google Ads

Hey, this is Austin from Grow My Ads. And in today's Quick and simple video, I'm going to talk about Google Ads data exclusions, what they are, why you would use them. And I'm actually going to go into a real account that I need to add a data exclusion and show you step by step how to do it. So let's go ahead and dive right in. So quickly on the Google support page. Use data exclusions for conversion data outages so smart bidding uses conversions and conversion value data in Google Ads to help meet your goals. If you have any issues with conversion tracking, you can use data exclusions to help reduce the impact that these issues may have on your smart bidding performance. So basically if you have an issue with your tracking and you're using smart bidding, so whether it's a TCPA bid strategy or TROAS bid strategy and you have a conversion tracking issue, if that tracking issue is not fixed for a while, it is going to impact the smart bidding. So you might have a campaign that was dialed in, running very smoothly, hitting your goal and then somehow a code on the back end of your website or a page changes or something and it whacks out the conversion tracking. So now all that conversion data that smart bidding had no longer is coming in. And I've seen this in many cases where you know, a developer might not be able to fix it right away or a developer can't figure out what's going on because they've made so many web changes that and that's what caused the issue. So I have seen accounts that were running perfectly fine and conversion tracking goes out and they can't fix it for one week, two weeks, sometimes a month. Plus the longer you wait to fix the conversion tracking, the more issues it's going to cause to your smart bidding because it's no longer going to get any new conversion data coming in. Even though it will work off of usually like a 30 day average and a historical average, it will start slowing it down and you'll notice the performance of your campaigns to start really tanking. So if this happens to you and you're able to fix it right away, you don't want the smart bidding learning off of the time frame where the conversion tracking was no longer working. So let me give you a real example of how to use then data exclusion during that timeframe where you had no conversions coming in. And what happens is when you enable data exclusions, you're just pinging to the smart bidding. Do not look at this time frame to learn off of so, so you just erase it out of its mind completely. And so it's a very nice feature to use when you run into these conversion tracking issues. So let's go ahead. And I want to show you inside of a real account. Okay, so I'm inside of a real account where we had tracking break for several days. So you'll notice on February 3rd, zero conversions came in. And this was not fixed until February 8th. But even February 8th wasn't good. So I believe it was fixed during the day on February 8, but we were getting conversions in this account every single day. That would be that blue line. And then it just completely drops off. There's nothing coming through on this time frame here. And then it spikes back up, but so does our cpa. So this time frame here, I want to chop away from the smart bidding. So that would be February 3rd through, and it's fixed on the 8th. But the. The 8th is still pretty messed up. So I don't want to use the 8th. I would actually chop away the 8th as well. Now, we did fix it on the 9th, but you'll notice our. Our conversion data was even bad then, like the smart bidding did not perform. This is an outlier day for sure to have a $500 CPA. This account averages around a $200 CPA. So even Friday was pretty bad. And you'll notice then Saturday, February 10, it started kind of coming back to somewhat normal. We. But this timeframe here, I don't want the smart bidding to use any of that data because it has no good conversion data. So it is pinging to it. This is all bad data now coming in. So you want to get rid of that bad data from its learning. And in order to do that, all we're going to do is add this data exclusion. So in this case, I get asked this a lot. When would you add it? Well, from here I know for sure this thing broke on February 3rd. You'll notice though, we had some weird days starting February 1st. So February 2nd is when. Well, even February 2nd was off. February 3rd was the official, this thing is gone. No conversion tracking at all. Something's messed up. But even the few days before that seemed a bit odd to me. So I'm actually going to take away February 1st because there is some of that, you know, attribution latency and everything else. So. So I play it safe. I may actually hack away a little extra than like the actual days based off of the data. And this data is telling me, yeah, let's just go ahead and take February 1st and 2nd away because these are outlier high CPA days. So maybe the conversion track was not fully working on these days as well. Then when did it start taking off? Well, I actually started getting really good data back on Saturday, February 10th, I believe. We, we did think we had it fixed on the day during February 8th. So technically I should be using February 9th, but I'm actually going to go ahead and just use February 10th and take out the 9th because the 9th wasn't very good either. So smart bidding went 9 days with bad conversion data compared to the historical averages that you see here. And so I'm actually, I'm removing about nine days here of data for it to even have in its system. So I'm just taking it away. And so then the smart bidding will no Longer look at February 1st through February 9th with the data. So where do you get that from? So you go simply up to tools and settings and then you go to your bid strategies. Then you go to your advanced controls. Here you'll see seasonality adjustments. By the way, I have a full video on seasonality adjustments. This is great during holidays or, or Black Friday, Cyber Monday or even just big sales you might be having. So make sure to go check that out. However, what we're going to do is actually go to the tab next to it called Data Exclusions. So here, this is where we can add the data exclusion. So let's go ahead and add that for this account. So I like to name it Conversion Tracking Broke and I usually like to time frame it to. You can add a description as well. I don't really need to in this case. So we're going to do start time February 1st in time February 9th. Then this you can actually choose what campaigns you want this applied to. And this actually this is a very good notification here. So even Google saying since conversions can be attributed to clicks in the past, select a date range that accounts for the typical conversion delay delay of two days in your account. So what it's saying is if your conversion tracking broke on February 3rd, we recommend at least going back two days to February 1st. Now I'm going to February 1st in this case because the data did look a little odd to me. Outliers, really high CPA days with only one conversion. I believe February 1st was the first full day we knew conversion tracking was fully broken. But even in this case I did decide to go back a couple days due to the data I was seeing. But even Google is highlighting, hey, make sure to go back a few days there too. So good pointer there. I've. I've added data exclusions several times with issues that we've had in the past. Normally you'll see it pretty clean, like you'll have a normal day and then the next day just drops off completely. So just look at the data. But feel okay if you need to add an additional day or two to that time frame. Even though conversion tracking might have been okay during those days, but you can kind of play it safe and add, add a couple additional days to the timeframe that you're going to be excluding. Now you can do this. So select campaigns and devices for the adjustment. Video campaigns aren't available for whatever reason. You can even choose specific campaigns for whatever reason. If this was happening on a specific campaign that you want to only exclude those times for that campaign. In this case, I need this for the entire account and so I'm not changing anything. I have all the campaigns and all the devices chosen and I'm just going to hit save. Now it's going to want me to confirm. Data exclusions may change how your bid strategies perform. Before you create an exclusion, confirm the information is correct. So February 1st through February 9th, that's eight full days. All the campaigns, all the devices, cool. And boom, create data exclusion. And there we go, you're done. That's it. Very simple. Now I can trust the smart bidding is going to hopefully pick back up where it was left off. It's still going to have some ups and downs. Anytime you remove conversion tracking or have a broken conversion tracking tag, expect a lull period after you fix it. Smart bidding just doesn't snap back into it overnight. Usually it takes a few days, if not a week to get itself redialed in. So even adding this, I still expect some ups and downs for probably the next week. And that's something that's been articulated to the client as well. But expect that. Don't think overnight you're just magically put a cheat code in your account. It's not how it works. You're still going to have some ups and downs, but at least you know now with this data exclusion that that time frame won't be included in any of the learning of the smart bidding. There you go. You now know how to add data exclusions to your Google Ads account. So if you ever run into a conversion tag issue and your account runs for a period of time with no conversion tracking, you now know you can go in, add the data exclusion and that way your smart bidding will not learn off of those days with no conversions coming in due to the conversion tracking issue. I hope you got great value from this video. If you have questions, go ahead and ask them in the comment section below. Better yet, we have a free Google Ads group called PPC Launchpad. The link to that group will be in the description below. I would love for you to to join. I've got a entire free Performance Max course in that group. It's hours of content on Performance Max campaigns along with a a notion doc that breaks down everything you need to know about Performance Max campaigns. Again, completely free when you join that group. So I'd love to see you inside and if not, no worries. I'll see you on the next video.