About a week after you apply Search Ads 360 bid strategy to a portfolio of items or create a budget bid strategy in a budget plan, you’re ready to check in on the bid strategy’s health and performance on the bid strategy's Overview tab.
The bid strategy's Overview tab includes different sections that together, provide an at-a-glance view of a bid strategy’s efficiency. The Overview includes:
- A health panel that indicates whether a bid strategy is operating efficiently.
- A performance summary graph shows the bid strategy’s performance over a specified time period.
- A color-coded timeline that shows when an issue that impacts the health of a bid strategy starts and ends. Hover on the timeline to display a summary of the issue.
- A scorecard that displays the bid strategy's metrics such as average position, actions, cost, and total number of biddable items in the portfolio.
Health panel
The health panel or health card displays general and specific information about issues that are impacting the bid strategy's performance, makes a recommendation about how to fix an issue, and for certain types of issues, makes adjustments to bids, budgets, or suggests settings that can resolve the issue.
Initially, the health panel displays a general message such as Minor issues detected or Currently learning, along with an icon that indicates the severity of the issue. The panel also includes the most recent date and time that Search Ads 360 found issues that impact the bid strategy's performance.
To display a separate, detailed message about each issue that's found, click the View Details button in the health panel message. The second message lists the issue, the date and time that Search Ads 360 found the issue, and suggests how to fix the issue. In some cases, the message may include an Apply button and a View button. Select the Apply button to allow the bid strategy to automatically fix the issue. Click the View button to display more information about the issue.
For example, if you're manually setting your remarketing target bid adjustments, and Search Ads 360 finds that the manually set bid adjustments are consistently out of line with the bid strategy's recommendation, a health panel message will recommend that you let the bid strategy automatically set the bid adjustments. Click the Apply button to let Search Ads 360 change the bid strategy's setting from recommend adjustments to set the remarketing target bid adjustments. Note that you can also navigate to the bid strategy's settings to manually change the option.
The health panel displays when:
- The bid strategy is learning.
- Minor issues, such as the budget is constraining performance, are detected.
- The maximum bid limit is too low.
- There aren't enough conversions (low conversion volume).
- The target is significantly different from historical performance.
- No minor or critical issues have been detected, except for the manually set bid adjustments. The bid strategy is only recommending bid adjustments and the manually set adjustments don't match the recommendation.
- Lots of keywords without performance history have been added to the bid strategy.
Don't see the health panel? The health panel is shown only if an ROI bid strategy or budget bid strategy is experiencing certain issues that adversely impact its efficiency. Learn more why the health panel isn't shown. Because the health panel only displays certain issues you may also want to check the Bid strategy health column for issues that may be impacting the bid strategy's efficiency
Health panel message types and icons
The following table lists the icons that are displayed in the health panel messages and timelines.
| Icons | Description |
|---|---|
| --- | No issues detected. The bid strategy is operating efficiently. |
 |
The bid strategy is in learning or calibration mode because the bid strategy is new or because a significant change, such as adding lots of new keywords, has been made to the bid strategy. The recommendation is to let the bid strategy finish learning.
The learning mode icon might not display immediately if a bid strategy uses a recently added conversion source.
|
 |
A minor issue, such as the budget is too low, is preventing the bid strategy from operating at its maximum efficiency. |
 |
Fix is in progress for a minor issue. |
 |
A critical issue, such as the maximum bid limit, is preventing the bid strategy from managing bids. |
 |
Fix is in progress for a critical issue. |
Health panel status column
Downloaded reports contain a column titled "Bid strategy health status." The column contains numbers associated with the status of the corresponding row's bid strategy. These numbers ordinarily range from 0 to 5, with negative numbers being reserved for special cases.
Here are some of the status numbers you can expect to see, coupled with their significance:
- Less than 0: Calibrating.
- Between 0 and 2: Critical issue.
- Between 2 and 5: Minor issue.
- Five: No issue.
Performance summary graph
As with the other performance summary graphs displayed in Search Ads 360, the bid strategy performance summary graph shows a chart of the bid strategy's performance over a specified time period. You can use the performance summary graph to compare the graphs of two different metrics to correlate the bid strategy’s performance for different benchmarks. For example, if you compare Actions and Cost, you might see that a decreased cost resulted in fewer actions, which may indicate that a limited budget is impacting bid strategy performance.
Timelines
Displays color-coded information related to the status and health of the bid strategy. You can point to the timelines to display an information card that includes the date, summary, and status of the issue. The timeline information card displays a summary that is similar to the health cards that are displayed when you click the View Details button in the bid strategy's health panel. The timeline information card enables you to get information about each issue.
The color coding in the timeline corresponds to the type of issue the bid strategy is experiencing. In the preceding image, the gray portion of the timeline and icon indicates that the bid strategy was in learning mode.
The red portion of the timeline and the exclamation point indicate that a critical issue is severely impacting the bid strategy’s efficiency.
The timeline also includes a summary card that briefly describes the issue and the status of the correction, if applied, that allows the bid strategy to operate efficiently.
Scorecard
Like the scorecards on other tabs in Search Ads 360, this one displays performance metrics of the bid strategy.