Estimate your results with bid, budget, and target simulators

There are 2 types of Google Ads simulators that you can use:

• Manual CPC bid simulators
• Smart Bidding simulators

Google Ads bid simulators help you see how different bids might change your ads’ weekly performance.

• The regular Bid Simulators show you how changes to your max. CPC bid might change the cost or the number of clicks, impressions, conversions, and conversion value your ads would have received for your keyword or ad group. You can find them on the Ad groups and Keywords page.
• The Campaign Bid Simulator shows you how changes to your campaign’s bids might affect that campaign’s performance. Find it on the Campaigns page.
• The Shopping Campaigns Bid Simulator shows you how certain changes to your bid might have impacted your product group's performance. You can find it on the Product groups page.
• The Hotel Campaigns Bid Simulator shows how changes to your max. CPC, max. CPC%, or Commission % might have impacted your hotel group’s recent performance. You can find it on the Hotel groups page for max. CPC and max. CPC% bid strategies and on the Campaign page for Commission % bid strategies.

Any active bid adjustments for your campaign or ad groups are taken into account during simulations.

If your campaign has a "Limited by budget" status, you'll get budget ideas in the pop-up window on your Campaigns page instead of the Campaign Bid Simulator. Learn more about Types of recommendations.

How bid simulators work

The bid simulators collect and analyze data from ad auctions on the Search Network and the Display Network while considering information such as Quality Score, keyword traffic, and competition in the ad auction. The tools use this information to estimate how your ads might have performed in terms of key metrics like cost, impressions, clicks, and conversion volume.

You can estimate your bid simulator results at scale by using the Google Ads API.

How to get bid simulator estimates

Using the bid simulators for conversion estimates

If you're using conversion tracking, the simulators offer conversion estimates to help you understand the number of conversions your ads might have received if you had set different bids. On the Search Network, if you've assigned values to your conversions — or set conversion values — you can review your conversion value estimates to get an idea of the conversion value you might have received if you had set different bids.

Here's some information to keep in mind:

• Conversion definitions: Conversions rely not only on ad interactions such as clicks, but also on the actions that customers take on your site. This can also make them more difficult to predict.
• Changes to conversion tracking: Removing or moving the conversion tracking tag could invalidate the estimates. Don't make any major changes to the conversion tracking code for at least 2 weeks before using the bid simulators for conversion and conversion value estimates.
• Conversion delay: Conversion delay occurs when people click on an ad and then take some time to complete a conversion action. Keep in mind that the conversion could still occur up to 90 days after each interaction depending on your chosen conversion window.
  • Search and Performance Max simulators count conversions related metrics recorded so far and also those that are expected to arrive, so that the current metrics and projected metrics are more accurate. For example, if 10 clicks took place during the simulation period but 5 conversions were recorded after the simulation period, the 5 conversions would be counted in the estimates.
  • Simulators for all other campaign types count conversions that are recorded during the simulation period. For example, if a click took place during the simulation period but the conversion wasn’t recorded until after the simulation period, the conversion wouldn’t be counted in the estimates. Learn more About conversion delay estimates.
• Sparse conversion data: There is usually less conversion data than click or impression data when calculating these estimates, so conversions can be more difficult to estimate. If your account doesn't typically get a lot of conversions, we may not have enough information to generate an estimate for conversions. The longer the history and the more conversions you have, the more accurate these estimates will be.

Learn how to Use the bid simulator with Standard Shopping campaigns.

Benefits of using the Campaign Bid Simulator

• You can view bid changes in aggregate and model changes even when keywords or ad groups might not have enough data for this on their own.
• Bid scaling is available, so you can see what might happen if you increased or decreased all your bids by a specific percentage (10%, for example).
• Because campaign-level bid changes can increase traffic significantly, we'll tell you whether you need to increase your budget and, if so, what to change it to.
• You can model what happens if you changed all your bids in the campaign to a fixed value. If you choose to apply one of these campaign-wide bid changes, your ad group default bids will be changed to this fixed value, and your keyword-level bids will be erased.

Troubleshooting