There is a variety of reporting data available to help you improve bid strategy performance. In particular, you can choose to display the following troubleshooting columns in the bid strategy reporting tables.
Include these columns in your reports: Click the Columns button in the toolbar above the performance summary graph. Under Available columns, click Bid strategy and select the columns from the dropdown that appears.
| Bid strategy column | Description |
|---|---|
% at max bid % at min bid |
The percentage of days within the selected range when keywords reached their maximum or minimum strategy bids. You may want to take action if the percentage is high, as you might not achieve your goals within the specified bid range. For example, if your keywords reached the max bid a high percentage of days, you may want to raise your max bid. |
| % cost err at max bid % cost err at min bid % pos err at max bid % pos err at min bid |
The percentage of error that can be attributed to a bid strategy's keywords being constrained by their bid limits. To lower these percentages, you may want adjust your max bid or min bid. For example:
Within these percentages, there may occasionally be factors outside bid constraints that caused the errors. |
% of optimal cost |
How your actual cost compares to your optimal cost. This is calculated as actual cost / optimal cost:
|
| % without clicks % without conv % without impr |
The percentage of days within the selected range when keywords did not have clicks, conversions, or impressions.
|
Current keywords |
The number of keywords currently in a bid strategy (not the number of keywords during the selected date range). You can click the column header to sort by number of keywords, which allows you to focus on the performance of your most active bid strategies. |
Diff from target pos |
A bid strategy's performance against a position target, whether that target is part of a CPA goal or a standalone goal.
This is not simply Average position - Target position. Instead, we compute the error values for each keyword, and then compute the average (weighted by impressions). For example, consider a bid strategy with a target position range of 1.0 - 4.0 for one keyword. The bid strategy runs for two days. If the keyword receives 1,000 impressions with an average position of 2.0 on the first day, and 500 impressions with an average position of 5.5 on the second day, the average position for the bid strategy is:
3.83 is within the target position range, so you might think the error is 0. However, in reality one-third of the impressions were not in the position range. The new column adds up keyword-level error values, weighted by the keyword's impressions:
We entered 0 for the first day, as the position of 2.0 is within the target range of 1.0 - 4.0. We then took the difference from the second day position (5.5) to the lower end of the target range (4.0), and the result is 1.5. We then weighted it by the number of impressions (500) and divided the whole term by all impressions (1500). 0.5 as a number may not be meaningful. However, it's useful when you sort your position strategies.
|
Optimal cost |
Based on the bid strategy settings, how much you should have spent for conversions on the keywords. For example:
Optimal cost is calculated daily based on that day's metrics. For example, if you change your target today, we won't update the optimal cost from last week. It always reflects the status of your settings on a given day. DoubleClick Search displays an Optimal cost of 0% for bid strategies with Position goals because there is no associated CPA or ERS.
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