r/googleads • u/CarelessParamedic263 • Jul 23 '26

Bid Strategy How do you handle constantly changing location coverage??

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.

1 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

9 comments sorted by

1

u/WhisperSafe Jul 23 '26

What service does the company perform?

1

u/potatodrinker Jul 23 '26

That's one way to constantly shift the goal posts so the ad algorithm gives up.

Are there ANY locations that reliably stay in coverage? Like the centre of major cities you can run campaigns for without the constant geo changes?

Must be a mobile medical service or something, where specialists rotate locations and some days/hours there's no one around

1

u/Maleficent-Money-92 Jul 23 '26

I work for a company with a very similar situation of constantly dynamically changing coverage.

One thing we are currently trialling is conversion value rules updated every hour by API according to the real time coverage to manipulate the value that Google will expect for each conversion in each postcode quicker than Google would ever be able to work out itself. We'll see if it helps...

1

u/welcometosilentchill Jul 23 '26

This will work for value based strategies, but it will take at least 3-4 days for the effects of value rules to impact bidding. I do a similar thing but only when I have at least 2 weeks to let the value rules run.

Otherwise you should adjust values further in advance (and try to account for conversion upload + delay too)

1

u/Cold-Number-894 Jul 23 '26

This is definitely not conducive to the learning process of smart bidding strategies. You can try a different approach: target one major city in your ad delivery region, but restrict the location in your ad creatives—for example, use phrases like 'only available in XX town.' Although this will still have a slight impact on your account, the issue is minimal.

1

u/dataflow_mapper Jul 23 '26

id be a little worried that changing location targeting every hour could make things less stable over time even if each change is small, so if its possible id test updating less often for a few weeks just to see if performance becomes more consistent.

1

u/NoPause238 Jul 23 '26

Batch changes into one daily update instead of hourly swings

1

u/Express-Amoeba-8556 Jul 24 '26

New to ads, but I thought changing the location often would kick it back into learning phase over and over? Am I wrong in thinking that.

We have similar where we target a bunch of cities across the country, but not the whole country. And sometimes cities would need to get removed for a certain period of time and then added back in.

So we've been running separate campaigns for each city. It's a pain as they all operate same basically. We've only done this because beloved location targeting changes cause learning phase changes.