Learning period

During learning, bids are less settled and results can swing. Judging a campaign in its first days after a change means judging the learning, not the result.

Every big change restarts it: a new strategy, a large target or budget move, new conversion actions. Changing often keeps a campaign learning forever.

1. Look at the Status column of the campaign table: it shows Learning when it applies.
2. Open Tools, then Budgets and bidding, then Bid strategies, to see the strategy's status.
3. Check Change history to see what triggered it.
4. Wait one or two conversion cycles, the time your conversions take to arrive, before judging.

A campaign's target CPA is cut from €60 to €40 in one step. It enters learning, spend drops and conversions fall. Moving the target in two smaller steps a fortnight apart would have kept it steadier.

• Changing targets again before the last change settled.
• Pausing a campaign during learning because of a few bad days.
• Making several big changes at once.

The audit checks Oppy runs on this, each with its own page.

• A target set a long way from what the account does
• Buying clicks on an account that needs results
• A target set before the bidding has enough to learn from

• Smart Bidding: Google's automated bid strategies that set a bid for each auction toward conversions or conversion value.
• Bid strategy: How a campaign sets its bids: by hand, or automatically toward a goal such as clicks, conversions, conversion value, a target CPA or a target ROAS.
• Experiment: A split test in Google Ads that runs a change on part of a campaign's traffic beside the original, so you can see whether the change worked rather than whether numbers moved afterwards.