Conversion Value Outliers
One or more conversion actions in this account have extreme value outliers. Individual conversions reporting values 10×, 100×, or more above the median. Outliers can corrupt Smart Bidding when the algorithm treats a single $50,000 conversion as evidence for a pattern that will not repeat. The fix is to investigate the outliers, fix the data pipeline if they are bugs, or cap conversion values if they are real-but-misleading.
Why It Matters
Smart Bidding learns from observed conversion values. A normal $129 e-commerce purchase teaches the algorithm what the average customer is worth; a single $250,000 enterprise contract that fired the same conversion action tells the algorithm an entirely different story. The algorithm cannot distinguish "this is a real but rare outcome" from "this is a data pipeline bug," so it weighs the outlier into its learned distribution. The result: bidding pushes spend toward audiences and contexts that resemble the outlier, even when the outlier is not reproducible. The check identifies extreme value distributions; the team must decide whether to investigate, cap, or filter.
How To Fix It
- AdLint's details list each conversion action and the magnitude of the outliers.
- For each, investigate the source: are the outliers genuine large transactions, or data pipeline bugs (currency mismatch, decimal-point error, sum of multiple transactions)?
- If bugs: fix the pipeline so future values are correct.
- If genuine but rare: consider a max-value cap on the conversion action (Google Ads supports this via offline import scripts) or move enterprise-scale transactions to a separate conversion action that does not feed automated bidding.
- Re-run Smart Bidding with cleaner signal.
Example
Action: Purchase
Median value: $129
Max value (30d): $48,720 (likely enterprise contract, not typical e-commerce)
Recommended action: investigate; cap or segregate enterprise-scale conversions.Google Ads conversion actions with extreme value outliers (individual conversions reporting values orders of magnitude above the median). Google's value-based bidding documentation, Smart Bidding weighs outliers into its learned distribution, which can push bidding toward irreproducible scenarios. Fix: investigate the source, fix data-pipeline bugs, and consider capping or segregating extreme-value conversions. Source: support.google.com/google-ads/answer/7335652.
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References
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