Flexible Bid Strategies in Google AdWords: New Reports

The Google AdWords interface is being updated and extended continuously. Google recently implemented three new reports for flexible bid strategies. With these reports you can understand how the bid strategies influence the campaign performance. We will show you the new features.

If you do not have flexible bid strategies in your AdWords account yet you can read in our blog how to create them.

1. Bid Strategy Status

Now you can see the bid strategy status in the bid strategy reports. You can see the following statuses:

Inactive: The bid strategy is not active.
Not limited: The bid strategy is active.
Learning: AdWords gathers the performance data needed for automated bid optimizations. Hover your mouse over the speech bubble next to the bid strategy status to see the remaining number of days. With this new feature you can understand when the bid strategy is in the learning phase and wait for further changes.
Limited: The reason for this status can be one out of five factors, for instance when the bidding limit has been reached. When hovering with your mouse over the speech bubble next to the bid strategy you can see the reason for the limited status.

2. Status Over Time Reporting

With this new report you can see the bid strategy status and campaign performance over a specified time range. This way you can understand what affects the bid strategy.
For example you can see the status of your bid strategy in relation to the campaign cost. If the expenses increased while the campaign status was “learning” this may indicate that you have increased the budget at that time.

3. Target Over Time Reporting

Now a graph can be displayed showing the goal of your bid strategy (for example the pre-defined target CPA) compared to the campaign performance. You can see the impact of bid strategy changes on the campaign performance.
For example now you can see if a decrease in conversions correlates with the decrease of the target CPA.

Do you have questions regarding the new AdWords reports for flexible bid strategies? Feel free to email me.