Smart Bidding Exploration in Google Ads: Everything you need to know

What is Smart Bidding Exploration in Google Ads? Google recently announced this new Smart Bidding feature at Google Marketing Live 2025, and it's designed to help advertisers discover additional valuable traffic without changing your keywords. Smart Bidding Exploration is moving into open beta in May 2025, meaning it will soon be available globally for all Google Ads accounts.

In this article, I'll cover everything you need to know about Smart Bidding Exploration, providing a practical guide to understanding and potentially leveraging this new tool. Once it rolls out, I'll update this post with more screenshots and practical tips, so bookmark this for later!

Everything you need to know about Smart Bidding Exploration in Google Ads:

• Smart Bidding Exploration explained: adjusting your ROAS without changing your tROAS
• Should you use Smart Bidding Exploration?
• Why not just lower your tROAS instead of using Smart Bidding Exploration?
• What are the features and limitations of Smart Bidding Exploration?
• Is Smart Bidding Exploration right for you?

Smart Bidding Exploration explained: adjusting your ROAS without changing your tROAS

Google describes Smart Bidding Exploration as an "AI-powered feature designed to identify new sources of valuable traffic to help you maximize performance for Search campaigns using Smart Bidding." In essence, it's a way to allow Google's Smart Bidding (specifically, Target ROAS bidding aka tROAS) to cast a slightly wider net. Importantly, Smart Bidding Exploration does NOT change your targeting! It casts that wider net by adjusting your bidding instead.

Think of it like this: let's say your current Google Search campaign using tROAS is like a focused fishing operation. You're aiming to catch a specific type of fish (conversions) within a known fishing ground (existing search queries) where you know you'll get a good return. You're doing well, but you've pretty much caught all the fish in that spot.

Smart Bidding Exploration is like giving your fishing boat a slightly longer line and a bit more bait. You're telling Google, "Hey, I'm okay with a slightly lower expected return on investment (ROAS) if it means sending my hook a little deeper down into the water and potentially catching more fish overall." The goal isn't to be more profitable per fish, but to increase your total catch by exploring new, but related, opportunities.

Analogies not your thing? Okay, goodbye fish and hello specifics.

Should you use Smart Bidding Exploration? 

When considering Smart Bidding Exploration, it's crucial to understand the core trade-off involved:

• More Total Profit: This is the primary advantage. By enabling Google to explore slightly less profitable but higher-volume opportunities, you have the potential to increase your overall revenue and net profit.
• Lower Profitability (per conversion): The trade-off is that to achieve this increased total profit, you'll need to accept a slightly lower ROAS for the traffic generated through this feature.

Let's look at a practical example to illustrate this point. Imagine your current Search campaign using tROAS bidding consistently achieves the following:

• Current ROAS: 3:1 (meaning you generate $3 in revenue for every $1 spent)
• Monthly Ad Spend: $1,000
• Monthly Revenue from Ads: $3,000
• Net Profit: $2,000 ($3,000 revenue - $1,000 spend)

Now, with Smart Bidding Exploration enabled at 10%, your ROAS could increase by up to 10%, meaning it could go from a ROAS of 3 to a ROAS of 2.7. However, because Google is now exploring new traffic, your spend and revenue could increase, leading to something like (illustrative numbers only):

• New ROAS: 2.7:1
• New Monthly Ad Spend: $1,500
• New Monthly Revenue from Ads: $4,050 ($1,500 spend * 2.7 ROAS)
• New Net Profit: $2,550 ($4,050 revenue - $1,500 spend)

In this scenario, even with a slightly lower ROAS, your total net profit has increased by $550. This demonstrates the central premise of Smart Bidding Exploration: accepting a minor dip in efficiency per conversion to gain a larger volume of conversions and, consequently, more overall profit.

It's worth noting that this has been a Google Rep sales narrative for years! Now, there's a feature built in to Google Ads to help you put this theory to the test in your campaigns: Smart Bidding Exploration.

Why not just lower your tROAS instead of using Smart Bidding Exploration?

My first reaction when I learned about Smart Bidding Exploration was, "Why would I use this feature? Why not just lower my tROAS by 10% if I want to reach additional queries?" While lowering your tROAS would certainly influence your bids, Google states that that the primary difference is that lowering your target ROAS would adjust your bids across all queries you're currently reaching. Smart Bidding Exploration, however, is intended to only adjust bids for queries you're not currently reaching. The idea is to find new opportunities without altering the behaviour of your already successful, established search terms.

I'll admit, I only find this answer 50% satisfying. The search auction is dynamic, new queries emerge constantly, and existing ones evolve. While the goal of Smart Bidding Exploration is to uncover genuinely new opportunities, the distinction between adjusting bids for "new" versus "existing" queries feels super nuanced and subjective. Remember, we are not changing your keywords or your dynamic ad targets, we are not changing your targeting. We are only using your bids as a lever to explore queries that might have previously been deemed too expensive or less likely to convert - in exchange for helping you capture more market share.

So feel free to test Smart Bidding Exploration, but you may be just as well off setting up an Experiment with a slightly lower tROAS.

What are the features and limitations of Smart Bidding Exploration?

If you've read this far, you must be a Google Ads practitioner who wants to understand all the ins and outs of Smart Bidding Exploration - so let's list them off:

• Smart Bidding Exploration is for Search campaigns only
• Smart Bidding Exploration only works with one bid strategy: Target ROAS
• Smart Bidding Exploration allows you to set a ROAS flexibility between 10% - 30%, meaning you can choose how far your target ROAS can potentially decrease in order to reach new traffic. For example, if your tROAS is 500% and you choose 10% ROAS flexibility, your campaign can now explore traffic that may deliver a 450% ROAS (10% of 500% is 50%), not a 490% ROAS. As always, a target ROAS is just a target, and not a guarantee of actual ROAS results.
• Smart Bidding Exploration is compatible with portfolio bidding (specifically tROAS)
• Smart Bidding Exploration is compatible with drafts and experiments
• Search terms generated via Smart Bidding Exploration will appear in your search terms report. They won't be distinguished or labelled separately from your "regular" traffic
• Reporting for Smart Bidding Exploration will be provided on a limited basis via "search category reporting," similar to what Performance Max campaigns had before search term reporting for PMax rolled out.

Is Smart Bidding Exploration right for you?

Most Google Ads advertisers should not use Smart Bidding Exploration. Full stop. This feature only makes sense for advertisers who have maxed out the current search opportunity and need to find new pockets of growth.

If you run Search campaigns using tROAS and observe the following metrics:

• Search lost IS (budget): 0% (meaning your campaigns are not restricted by budget)
• Quality Score: 6 or higher for most keywords in your campaign (indicating your ad rank is likely suffering due to bid restrictiveness and not quality issues)

and you have more budget to spend, then Smart Bidding Exploration could be a valuable tool to help you responsibly increase bids on those "just out of reach" queries, allowing you to expand your reach and secure more market share.

As with any new Google Ads feature in beta, proceed with caution, give the system sufficient time to test, and see if this unlocks new opportunities for your business.

More updates from Google Marketing Live 2025

Google Marketing Live 2025: Recap for Small Business Owners
Google Marketing Live 2025: Recap for Lead Gen Advertisers
Google Marketing Live 2025: Recap for Ecommerce Businesses

AI Max for Search Campaigns: What you need to know about "Search Max"
Smart Bidding Exploration in Google Ads: Everything you need to know

Performance Max Channel Reporting: Transparency, But No Control
Performance Max Search Terms Report & Negative Keywords - Finally!

All About Shoppable YouTube Ads: Shoppable Masthead, Shoppable CTV
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