Google Adds Reporting Features For AdWords Flexible Bid Strategies

Google has added three new reporting features for flexible bid strategies in AdWords.

New status annotations provide more information about each bidding strategy. For example, clicking on the “Learning” status annotation for a new or recently updated bidding strategy will show the number of days left for learning and the days since the last big change. This lets you know that AdWords is still optimizing bids and tells you how long to wait before making other changes or analyzing baseline performance of the strategy.

Another example of a status annotation is “Limited (bid limits).” This annotation will show when there are minimum or maximum bid constraints in the strategy. Clicking on this annotation will show what percentage of impressions or spend is limited by the bidding constraints.

The full list of status annotations is available on this help page. You’ll need to enable “Bid strategy” and “Bid strategy type” columns to view bid strategy details.

In the Shared Library, two reports are now available to show bidding strategy performance over time at the bid strategy level.

Status over time reporting includes status annotations along the bottom of performance graphs to help shed light on what might be influencing bid strategy performance during a specific date range.

Target over time reporting will show the bidding strategy targets that were set during a time period on the performance chart so you can quickly see whether performance changes were likely tied to target changes.