Google Ads Explanations Beta; Explains Large Performance Changes

Google Ads launched a new beta feature named “explanations.” Explanations gives you clear insights into large changes in your Google Ads account performance. Google said it helps you with “understanding why your performance changes is critical when optimizing a campaign.”

Google said “With explanations, you can view the most likely reasons for impression, click, and cost changes with the click of a button. This makes it easy for you to spend more time focusing on optimization, and less time investigating performance issues. For example, let’s say you notice a big week-over-week drop in impressions for one of your campaigns. Rather than diving into multiple reports to find out what happened, you can just click on the “See Explanations” button on your campaign and ad group tables while in time comparison mode.”

Here is what it can show you:

• Bid changes: How changes to your bids may have affected where and how often your ads showed.
• Bid Modifier changes: How changes to your device bid modifier, location bid modifier, demographic bid modifier, and audience bid modifier may have affected performance.
• Budget changes: How changes to your budget may have affected how many clicks and impressions your ads received.
• Budget allocation: How spreading your budget across multiple entities (for example, ad groups) may have affected the performance of other entities.
• Budget exhaustion rate: How changing your average cost-per-click (CPC) may have caused your budget to run out more quickly or slowly than usual.
• Eligibility: How different factors may have affected how often your ads were eligible for traffic (for example, budget exhaustion or pausing an ad group or campaign, when all ads in an ad group were disapproved).
• Change history: How changes to your account may have affected your account’s performance.
• Targeting changes: How changes to location targeting, keywords targeting, keyword status, and adding/removing an audience may affect performance.
• Auction competitions and search interest: How changes in search volume on Search partners and opt-in/opt-out of Search partners may affect performance.

To access this:

• Sign in to your Google Ads account.
• From the navigation menu on the left, click Search campaigns.
• From the page menu on the left, click Campaigns or Ad groups. 
• In the upper right corner of your screen, click the down arrow next to the date range.
• Click the toggle next to “Compare” to turn on a second date range field.
• In the top range, select the dates you want to compare.
• Next, make sure you select Previous period under “Compare.”
• Click Apply. You’ll see results for both date ranges in your performance chart.
• You’ll see a % change added below the numbers in your performance metrics columns. They look like “+X%” or “-X%”. Significant changes will be highlighted in blue. Click a highlighted % change to open the explanations panel.
• Click More details to get details about a specific entity’s performance change.

Here are screen shots:

Here is a GIF:

New Google Ads feature “Explanations”. Access it when comparing date ranges, this new Explanations feature displays some possible reasons why the performance changed. Very interesting idea. https://t.co/64RGbULbvL pic.twitter.com/68sZjMeRyL

— Aaron Weiner (@aaronweiner) December 5, 2019

Forum discussion at Twitter.