Google Ads Bid Strategy Status indicates whether automated bid strategies for Google Ads campaigns are active or not. Google Ads Bid Strategy Status also highlights the reasons why bidding is limited.
Know your campaign status in Google Ads
PS: Bid Strategy Status is applicable only to those advertisers who use Google Ads automated bidding.
In this article, I have explained different Google Ads Bid Strategy Status and their meaning.
Different Google Ads Bid Strategy Status
Inactive: Inactive bid strategies aren’t dormant. There could be a few reasons why bid strategies get inactive.
If no campaigns, ad groups, or keywords are using a bidding strategy, it gets idle.
Know your keyword status in Google Ads
Google changes the bidding strategy’s status to inactive if you pause the ad groups and the keywords associated with the bid strategy.
If you spend out of the budget, it could cause a bidding strategy to become inactive.
Active: If the status is active, you got nothing to do. Active bidding strategies optimize your bids for performance.
Learning: Google is continuously learning. It understands your campaign performance and suggests improvements. Learning status indicates that Google is gathering performance data which it uses to optimize bids. When you hover over the “speech bubble” next to the status, you will find the reason why Google is learning about this strategy. The reasons could be:
- The strategy is brand new.
- You changed the budget.
- You changed setting such as conversion settings or conversion action settings.
- Campaigns, ad groups, or keywords related to the bidding strategy are altered.
Note
It is best not to change strategies often. Google Ads takes time to learn each time you make any changes. And the data during the learning period is not accurate. Please wait till it ends to use the data to measure the performance.
Limited: Bidding strategies have limited/restricted performance due to several reasons.
- Keywords bids are either higher than the maximum bid limit or low than the minimum bid limit.
- Missing conversion data or very little data for Google Ads to optimize effectively.
- Automated/manual bids are using up the shared bidding strategy budget.
- Multiple campaigns using a bidding strategy are limited by budget (daily budget lower than the minimum).
- Poor quality score keywords that result in a low impression count that is insufficient to meet the bidding strategy goals.
Misconfigured (conversion settings): Different automated and conversion-based bid strategies such as Target cost-per-acquisition (CPA), Target return-on-ad-spend (ROAS), Maximize conversions, or Enhanced cost-per-click (ECPC) use historical conversion data to optimize bid performance. Also, if conversion tracking and conversion actions aren’t right, automated bidding strategies won’t work well.
Learn how conversion settings can limit bid strategy performance, and how to fix the settings.
