More prominent reporting helps you monitor the health of your automated bidding

Automated bidding in AdWords is an invaluable tool that helps marketers save time and improve performance. Powered by Google’s machine learning, it optimizes bids at scale for each and every auction and factors in a wide range of signals to help you tailor bids to a user’s unique context. In 2015, we announced a series of new reporting features in the Shared Library to provide greater transparency into automated bidding performance. We’re now bringing bidding insights front and center to the places you spend the most time in AdWords with three new features:

• New alerts that immediately flag bidding issues 
• Bid strategy statuses that appear directly in your campaign and ad group status columns 
• Rich performance reporting for standard bid strategies set at the campaign-level

New bidding alerts help you troubleshoot issues 

New alerts are now available specific to automated bidding to help you identify and resolve issues as quickly as possible. We’ve started with alerts that flag when your conversion tracking settings are “misconfigured” and will roll out additional alert types in the future. For example, you may see the “Misconfigured” alert if you use a bid strategy like Target CPA that optimizes for conversions, but have your conversion tracking turned off or haven’t added a conversion action to your primary Conversions column.

Bidding statuses get integrated with campaign and ad group statuses 

In the coming weeks, we’re also introducing bid strategy statuses to the main campaign and ad group status columns to increase their visibility in your day-to-day workflows. For example, if you have bid limits that are preventing your bids from being fully optimized, you’ll see the “Eligible (Limited)” status right in your main status columns.

These will be the updated status types that can be applied to your automated rules and saved filters and reports:

Status	What’s changing
Eligible	No change
Eligible (Budget limited)	Renaming the current “Limited by budget” status to be more consistent with other status types
Eligible (Learning)	New status type for automated bidding
Eligible (Limited)	New status type for automated bidding
Eligible (Misconfigured)	New status type for automated bidding

 

Rich performance reporting arrives for standard bid strategies 

We’re also expanding reporting capabilities available for portfolio bid strategies to standard bid strategies set at the campaign-level. These reports are rolling out over the next few weeks, and you can access them from the “Bid strategy” dropdown menu in the Campaigns tab to track how changes in your bidding status and targets impact performance over time.

Visit the Help Center and check out our best practices to learn more about automated bidding. For more details on how auction-time bidding technology works in conversion-based bid strategies, read this full guide.  

Posted by: Jonathan Wang, Product Manager, AdWords Bidding