In our continuing series of articles about automated bid strategies in Google Ads, we now take a look at how – when checking campaign performance – it’s useful to review the bid strategy statuses to ensure they are running as expected and how they can help resolve any issues, as needed.
There are currently six statuses for an automated bid strategy, as outlined here:
Inactive
The bid strategy isn’t active. There are three reasons for this:
- Campaigns are paused, or there are no campaigns attached to this bidding strategy.
- All keywords or ads using this strategy are paused.
- A prepaid budget has been spent.
Active
The bid strategy is active and setting bids to optimise performance. No changes are needed.
Learning
After a change is made to a bid strategy, there may be minor performance fluctuations as Google Ads optimises the bids. To indicate this, a ‘Learning’ status may be shown, including the expected time for the learning process to be complete.
That can be hovered over to see which of the following 5 reasons cause this status:
- New strategy
- Setting change
- Conversion setting change
- Conversion action setting change
- Composition change
Limited
This status can also be moused over to see one of the 5 reasons for that:
- Inventory
- Bid limits
- Low priority spend
- Budget constrained
- Low Quality Score
Mis-configured (Maximise bid strategy with shared budget)
For automated bid strategies that help maximise performance (clicks, conversions and conversion value), all campaigns in the same shared budget should be utilising the same portfolio bid strategy.
These are the two reasons for this status:
- Standard (campaign-level) bid strategy is mis-configured
- Portfolio bid strategy is mis-configured
Mis-configured (conversion setting)
For automated conversion-based bid strategies, the conversion actions need to be set up correctly, or that could impact the accuracy of the strategy’s automated bids, limiting the conversions.
(This applies to Search and Shopping campaigns using target cost-per-action (CPA), Target return on ad spend (ROAS), Maximise conversions, or Enhanced cost-per-click (ECPC)).
These are the four reasons for this status:
- Conversion tracking missing
- Missing app install conversion actions
- Missing phone call conversion actions
- Missing website conversion actions
When using automated bidding strategies it’s important to ensure everything is initially set up correctly and to regularly monitor these statuses, so issues can be quickly resolved if they transpire.
If you want to know more about how using automated bidding strategies could help your business, please get in touch. We have extensive experience as Google Ads / AdWords consultants since 2002.