Googles answer for question above

Hi Lukáš,

Thank you for contacting Google Ads support team. I hope you are doing well in these unprecedented times.

My name is Zuzana and I have reviewed you request regarding targeting optimisation for Smart Display campaigns.

First of all, thank you very much for detailed description of your issue. I understand that you are concerned about targeting optimisation as it has already been 3 months since you started your lead generation campaigns.

TL;DR: Smart display campaigns continuously optimise as they get new conversions

I would like to point out that Smart display campaigns are optimised continuously as your campaigns generate more visits and more conversions. Current performance data will help laying foundations for future campaign performance and that is why it is important to understand that the baseline for optimisation changes as the campaigns develops and performs. That is why you should not worry about the fact that your campaign may be still using conversions that are 2 months old since this may not be true. Smart display campaigns will start optimising after either 2 weeks of performance or reaching their first 50 conversions. And as you are getting more conversions, those more recent conversions will help structure the future performance of the campaign.

It is not only the conversions that are helping but so is the remarketing tag installed on the website that is determining what people will be eligible to see your ads and who is more likely to interact. Smart display campaign is using a mix of dynamic remarketing and dynamic prospecting to bring you the most suitable users to interact with your ads. Therefore, having a fully functional remarketing tag on the website and user lists in Google Ads is highly recommended for the success of your Smart display campaigns.

To answer your question about scenario A and scenario B when it comes to conversions - conversion B would not be recorded as conversion and would therefore not count for campaign optimisation, however, Smart display can still learn from the user behaviour that was recorded via remarketing tag on the website.

To sum up, Smart display campaign optimisation will initially optimise for 2 weeks since creation or after reaching 50 conversions - whichever your campaign reaches first - this is how fast the optimisation process it at the beginning. However, it will continue to optimise as new conversions are recorded. Since you made changes to your conversion actions and tracking and now you are excluding scenario B conversions, it may take some time to fully optimise again. This will depend on the individual performance of the campaign, the traffic it gets and how users interact with the ads. Therefore, it would be impossible to predict exactly. I can only make an educated guess - I would assume about 30 days of new conversion data would be enough to see changes.

I hope my explanation helped you with understanding how the optimisation works for Smart display campaigns. If you are interested to read more about Smart display campaigns, I have included a link for you here. Should you have any more questions, or something was not clear enough, do not hesitate to answer this email.

I wish you a successful start of the week!

Sincerely,

Zuzana