Page Summary
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Bid simulations estimate ad group, criteria, and campaign performance under different bidding scenarios to optimize your bidding strategy.
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These simulations predict the impact of bid changes on cost, impressions, and clicks using historical data, similar to the Google Ads UI bid simulators.
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Bid simulations help research scenarios like adjusting bids to manage costs or increase impressions and clicks by showing projected performance based on past data.
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By examining simulated past performance at different bid levels, you can make informed decisions for future bid adjustments and campaign bid modifiers.
The Google Ads API lets you retrieve bid simulation data, which can help you estimate how changes to bids, targets, or budgets might impact your performance for key metrics like cost, clicks, impressions, and conversions.
Use case
Suppose you have an ad that's been running for a few weeks, and it is costing a lot more than you expected or wanted to spend.
You want to test what might happen if you lower your bids a little. How many fewer impressions and clicks would your ad get? How much less would it cost?
Conversely, what if your ad isn't getting the number of impressions and clicks you expect? How do you know where you should set your bids to fix that problem?
Bid simulations help you research these scenarios. When you fetch a bid simulation, it shows projected impressions, clicks, and cost during the time period your ad was showing.
With bid simulations, you can examine performance statistics for the past week at the current level of bidding, alongside simulated performance over the same time period using different bid amounts.
By analyzing how your ads might have performed differently in the past, you can make more informed decisions about how to adjust your bids, targets, and budgets for the future.
API capabilities compared to the Google Ads UI
The API provides access to simulation data through the following resources:
- Campaigns (
campaign_simulation): Simulates the impact of budget changes, CPC bid changes, Target CPA or Target ROAS target changes, and Target Impression Share changes. - Ad groups (
ad_group_simulation): Simulates the impact of changing ad group-level CPC or CPV bids, or Target CPA or Target ROAS targets. - Ad group criteria
(
ad_group_criterion_simulation): Estimates the effects of keyword or listing group CPC bid changes and Hotel listing group percent CPC bid changes. - Bidding strategies
(
bidding_strategy_simulation): Assesses outcomes for portfolio Target CPA or Target ROAS bidding strategy changes.
This functionality is similar to the bid simulator features available for these entities within the Google Ads UI. However, the API's focus is on providing the raw simulation data. It may not encompass all the specialized simulation visualizations, tools, or simulation types present in the Google Ads UI.
How to use API bid simulations
To programmatically retrieve and use bid simulation data, query the simulation resources in the API. These resources provide point estimates for different bid, target, or budget values.
Before querying bid simulations, review the Prerequisites for account and traffic requirements and supported channel types. For a comprehensive list of available simulation resources, fields, and code examples, see Retrieve bid simulations.