Make sure that your creatives are tailored to your audience and that you avoid replacing all creatives in an ad group in the middle of a campaign.
If you need to change creatives, expect a temporary performance shift while your new ads gather performance history – performance will only return to previous levels if the ads perform similarly in terms of click-through rate and conversion rate. New ads may have different performance versus the current ads, which can impact the scale achieved.
Why creative changes can affect a campaign's performance
- Ad rotation settings affect which creatives enter the auction.
- New ads don’t have performance history to understand their expected click-through and conversion rates, so Google automated bidding strategies have less data to make a bidding decision.
- When determining how much to bid for a particular creative, we evaluate factors (such as historical click-through rate, conversion rate, device, and more) to set the bid.
Tips to minimise performance fluctuations
- If using asset-based creatives, gradually rotate in new assets and don’t pause all existing assets at once. Performance history for asset-based creatives is associated with both the individual assets and the ad group. Removing all the assets can cause a significant performance history loss.
- If using static image ads (for example, ads using .jpeg or .png image files), swap out one ad (per ad size) at a time and pause the lowest performer in the ad group. Don’t delete ads if you plan to relaunch.
- Do resume paused creatives rather than uploading the same creative again. We can use the old history to ramp up.
- Do remember that if you're using third-party serving tools with your ads, you limit the data Google can see and optimise toward.
- Do follow all display campaign creative best practices.
- Do use Maximise conversions rather than target CPA or target ROAS if you are changing all creatives out weekly in an ad group.
- Don’t pause all creative assets in an ad group at once. This results in performance fluctuations. If you must pause your creative assets, raise bids by 20%.
- Don’t drop bids at the same time that you add new creative assets to an ad group. Remember that performance of your creative impacts your scale. If you add new ads or assets that drive lower click-through rates or conversion rates, you may see a drop in traffic and conversions as a result.
