Understand performance changes with explanations

December 5, 2019

Understanding why your performance changes is critical when optimizing a campaign. However, it can be time-consuming to diagnose why your metrics can fluctuate. To help you understand some performance changes in your campaigns and ad groups faster, you can now request explanations.

With explanations, you can view the most likely reasons for impression, click, and cost changes with the click of a button. This makes it easy for you to spend more time focusing on optimization, and less time investigating performance issues. For example, let’s say you notice a big week-over-week drop in impressions for one of your campaigns. Rather than diving into multiple reports to find out what happened, you can just click on the “See Explanations” button on your campaign and ad group tables while in time comparison mode.

Before you get started with explanations, keep the following in mind:

  • Explanations is currently available for manual CPC or eCPC Search campaigns
  • Explanations can compare two time periods of equal length within the last 90 days
  • Explanations may only show for campaigns with significant performance changes

Explanations in Google Ads UI 1

Explanations in Google Ads UI 2

Explanations is currently in beta, and we'll continue to expand on its functionality in the coming months. Learn more about explanations in the Google Ads Help Center.

Posted by Pallavi Naresh, Product Manager, Google Ads​

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