About bid strategy statuses

When checking the performance of your campaigns, it’s helpful to also review the status of your automated bid strategies to confirm that they’re running as expected. If necessary, you can help resolve any issues. Learn where to view the status of your bid strategies.

This article describes what each bid strategy status means.

Bid strategy statuses

Inactive

The bid strategy isn't active. Here are some reasons why a bid strategy might be inactive:

  • Campaigns, or all the keywords and ads in the campaigns are paused, or there are no campaigns attached to the bid strategy.
  • The client account serving the ads is paused. This may indicate a billing issue with the client account.
    • For example, if there is only one Google Ads account linked to the bid strategy, and the Google Ads account has hit its prepaid budget, this would result in an inactive status.

Active

The bid strategy is active and setting bids or budgets to optimize performance or achieve targets in conversion-based bid strategies. No changes are needed.

Learning

After the following kinds of changes are made to a bid strategy, there may be performance fluctuations as the automated bidding system enters learning mode to adapt to the differences.

You can hover over the “Learning” status text to see why the bid strategy entered learning mode.

What affects the duration of the learning period?

The duration of the learning period is primarily affected by several factors:

  • The number of conversions that your campaigns obtain.
  • The length of a typical conversion delay or the amount of time it takes for a click to result in a conversion.
  • The type of bid strategy (Target CPA and Target ROAS) or budget bid strategy (Maximize Conversions and Maximize Conversion Value).

It can take about 2-3 conversion cycles for the bid strategy to calibrate to certain types of changes, although it can be faster depending on the amount of conversion data. Conversion data from previous campaigns can help drive faster results by speeding up the initial learning period required for bid strategy to calibrate towards your business goals. Learn how to fix the performance of your bid strategy when the conversion volume is too low.

New strategy

The bid strategy was recently created or reactivated. The bidding system is now adjusting to optimize your bids, budgets, or achieve targets in conversion-based bid strategies.

Learn how to Allow a bid or budget strategy time to learn.

Setting change

A setting (for example a target change or a constraint) for the bid strategy was changed. The bidding system is now adjusting to optimize your bids.

Learn more about when Target is significantly different from historical performance.

Campaign membership (composition) change

Campaigns have been added to or removed from the bid strategy. The bidding system is now adjusting to optimize your bids.

Next step

Continue using your campaigns as usual, but be mindful that key metrics may vary during this time, so you may not want to measure performance until the learning period is over.

Limited

Your bid strategy is limited by one of the following factors. You can hover over the status to see which factor is limiting your bid strategy.

Ad inventory (applies to Google Ads only)

Your bid strategies are limited by available search volume. Your ads are only eligible to show on a limited number of searches.
An inventory status might appear if the bid strategy includes only Google Ads campaigns.

Bid limits

Maximum and/or minimum bid limits are preventing your bids from being fully optimized.

For example, 95% of spend is limited by your maximum bid limit. This means that for 95% of spend, your bid strategy would have set a higher bid, but was prevented from doing so by the max bid limit.

Next step

If your bid strategy is not performing as well as you'd like, you may want to increase the maximum bid limit and/or decrease the minimum bid limit. Learn how to fix the performance of your bid strategy when the maximum bid limit is constraining it.

Budget constrained

Many of the campaigns using this strategy are limited by budget. As a result, the bid strategy may not be able to raise bids enough to meet your goals. Learn more about a bid strategy’s performance when the budget is constraining it.

Next step

Increase the campaign budgets associated with the bid strategy.

Learn about how advertising platforms manage campaign budgets:

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