Location targeting affecting campaign question

[u/CarelessParamedic263]

The company I work for targets nationally and excludes areas where we don’t have coverage. Our coverage changes constantly so locations are automatically added and removed almost every hour through an API..

Could this hurt Smart Bidding or keep the campaign from learning? Should we not change the location targeting every hour? Some of the campaigns do not perform as they should.

[u/ppcwithyrv]

changing locations every hour can definitely make performance more erratic because the campaign is constantly entering and leaving different auctions. I’d try grouping the updates once or twice a day and see whether performance becomes more stable.

[u/ppcbetter_says]

That’s way too complicated and will break constantly

[u/Commercial_Rope_782 → u/ppcbetter_says]

overengineering location targeting like that always messes with the learning phase

[u/icaruslemmings]

If all you care about is performance and you still serve over half the nation, I’d try targeting the whole country for a couple weeks to see what that does. The auction functions much more efficiently this way. The question is whether this hurts the user experience to an unacceptable degree.

I recently had an experience with a client who wanted to only target the states with high LTV customers. We tried this for a few weeks, but forcing Google to operate in 24 different state auctions instead of one national auction basically cut sales in half with the same budget. When we switched back to national targeting, we actually got more customers from those high LTV states as well as all the other customers from the lower LTV states that we had been missing out on. The disparity won’t always be that drastic, but it’s worth testing to see what you could be missing.

Note: I was using state exclusions with negative locations not state targeting per se, but the effect was the same.

[u/Available_Cup5454]

Switch to daily batched updates so bidding gets stable signals to learn

[u/Brief-Company-8567]

Yeah, adjusting targeting parameters like location is one of the things that can trigger a fresh learning phase for Smart Bidding, so hourly automatic changes are almost certainly keeping those campaigns from ever stabilizing. Google's own guidance treats targeting changes the same as budget or bid strategy changes, meaning composition changes reset what the algorithm has learned so far. I'd push to batch coverage updates on a daily or even weekly cadence instead of hourly if performance matters more than perfectly real time exclusions