Before you begin
Assess performance based on your bid strategy and optimisation goal
Before making conclusions about your campaign performance, it’s important to first consider whether the settings that you’re using match the metrics that your campaign is optimising towards. Updating your campaign’s bid strategy or optimisation goal settings to align with your business and advertising goals will help ensure that you’re focusing on the relevant metrics when analysing campaign performance to understand what drove fluctuations.
For example, Target CPA helps you get as many conversions as possible at or below the target cost-per-action (CPA) you set. In campaigns using Target CPA, cost per conversion and other conversion-related metrics may be better indicators of performance than cost per click and impressions.
1. Recent changes to account or campaign settings
Editing any account or campaign settings, such as bid strategy, budget, conversion goals, audiences, location, language and ad scheduling can change your performance.
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2. Conversion tracking setup and conversion delay
If there’s a sudden drop or increase in global pings or tag fires for a conversion action that your campaign is using for Autobidding, this can result in a drop in serving and spending as Google Ads optimises towards your set conversion action.
3. Bids and bid targets
Your performance may fluctuate if your bids, bid limits or bid targets are set without taking into consideration the historical data that Google Ads will use to serve your ads.
4. Budget settings
Your campaign may be more likely to have performance fluctuations when its budget is limited.
5. Creative coverage and diversity
For your Performance Max campaign, it’s important to ensure that you have a diverse set of creatives that can be automatically combined into various ad formats that can serve across all surfaces.
6. Targeting settings and overlaps (Location, Language)
If your campaign is targeting a smaller group of users with very specific location or language settings, it may be more likely to have performance fluctuations. You may have multiple campaigns or ad groups in your account that are eligible to enter overlapping auctions due to similar keywords or other targeting.
7. Policy and ad review status
Any time you add or make changes to your assets or asset group, they will be re-submitted for policy review. Performance Max campaigns must comply with all Google Ads policies.
8. Other account issues
Issues with your payments, billing transfers or other account level issues can impact the performance of your account, and therefore the performance of your campaigns.
9. Auction dynamics
The choices that other advertisers, who are participating in the same auctions as you, make can affect your campaign’s performance.