Once templates are set up and saved, Search Ads 360 evaluates the templates and generates entities. Your feed is evaluated multiple times throughout the day, and the corresponding templates are adjusted. The time needed to make these adjustments depends on the campaign size and number of changes. The Templates table lists the templates created, template type, data sources used, associated accounts, and the evaluation time.
There are two ways templates are evaluated:
- System Evaluation: Templates are automatically evaluated several times a day at the sub-manager level. Search Ads 360 makes adjustments and updates entities managed by the templates based on feed data changes or updates to the templates themselves. Any updates to feeds and templates made during the system evaluation cooling period will not be picked up until the next system evaluation.
- Manual evaluation: Template evaluation can be started by clicking the Evaluate button, which is located at the top of the Template table. Clicking the Evaluate button starts evaluation for all templates in the sub-manager account. For manual evaluations, the cooldown period is one hour, so after the manually initiated evaluation is done, another manual evaluation cannot be initiated for one hour. When you click the Evaluate button, the button grays out for one hour and a notification saying “Evaluation request sent” is displayed. Once the evaluation is completed, another notification will display. Manual evaluations are ideal for promotional periods or in cases where you need to fix errors in the live entities or to make dynamic ad changes, like price updates. These changes happen immediately.
Instructions
To view the time and date of the most recent evaluation, do the following:
- Sign in to your new Search Ads 360.
- Navigate to a sub-manager account.
- On the navigation menu, click the tools and settings icon.
- Under "Shared Library", click Templates.
- Locate the “Evaluation time” column in the Templates reporting table. For each template in the table, the following is displayed:
- The last time the template was evaluated.
- The net-new “Generated entities” that resulted since the last template evaluation.
Note: The “Generated entities” column shows the total number of entities that are managed by the template. The value is refreshed after each evaluation. If an entity is changed to “unmanaged”, it will be deducted from the generated entity count. If a template is set to “Pause upon creation”, entities will be included in the initial count after their first evaluation, and then be removed in the subsequent evaluation.
- The “Error status”. (For information about errors, see Identify and fix template output errors.)