The Google Ads interface has come a long way over the years. Initially it was a glorified table showing campaigns with performance metrics like clicks, impressions, CTR, spend, etc. As Google Ads has grown to include the Google Display Network, YouTube Ads, Gmail Ads and many others, the interface has become increasing data-dense.
Given the enormous amount of data available, deciding what to look at is critical for advertisers. You can customize almost any view in the interface to show the columns that are most important to you and you can even save those column sets. However, Google has their opinions on which metrics they feel are most important too.
AI Is Important To Google
Because Google controls the default view in the interface, you can learn a lot about what Google feels is important by what they put into prominent positions. The other day I was navigating through a Google Ads account and noticed that insights were being auto-generated in the Insights tab:
As you can see, this is the first thing in the main body of this page and it is being generated via AI (hence the “Google AI is experimental” caveat in the lower right corner. Google obviously wants this to be seen. My curiosity was piqued so I clicked the “View Details” button and behold:
The trigger for this insight was an increase of 329 clicks across two campaigns when comparing the last 30 days to the previous period. Obviously I had to black out the identifying names, but the top campaign here that was responsible for 302 clicks was a display campaign. The second campaign with the increased budget was a search campaign.
This was something I had noticed and called out to my client already, so Google did a great job highlighting this performance variation. The budget increase was definitely the drive of campaign #2, but I would have been more impressed if they had called out that campaign #1 had a new ad group created in that time period. That new ad group drove the majority of the increased clicks. So I think there is room for Google to continue improving this tools ability to answer the “Why did this happen?” question when it detects performance variations.
Where Else Is Google Using AI To Surface Performance Insights
When I’m using Google Ads, I’m most often looking at the views including Campaigns, Ad Groups, Keywords, etc. where there is a performance chart. The careful observer has probably noticed a small icon that looks like three stars along the x-axis. The chart below features four of them:
If you hover over one of these icons you get a message like this:
Again, we see that Google has identified a performance variation (cost was up 73%) for a campaign when looking at August 21-22 compared to August 19-20. Excellent data point to call out and most advertisers would love to know “Why did this happen?” If they click on the blue “View explanations” link here the interface slides in a right sidebar tool which walks through their analysis.
The Google Ads Explanations Sidebar
To my knowledge, the only way to trigger this tool is through the icon in graphs like above. It looks at no fewer than 18 different areas to determine why performance has changed. Here is what it looks at:
- Auction activity
- Budget
- Prominence metrics
- Search interest
- Bid limit changes
- Bid strategy target changes
- Bid strategy type changes
- Bidding precision
- Bids and bid adjustments
- Campaign conversion setting changes
- Conversion action changes
- Conversion value fluctuations
- Eligibility status changes
- Historical patterns
- Negative keywords
- Network changes
- Targeting changes
- Top changed segments
This is a great list if you’re auditing performance and it shows that Google is looking in many of the right places to answer “Why did this happen?” So I grabbed screenshots of the entire sidebar for my August example of 73% higher spend. What did Google have to say?
First off, they show me the spend for each date range. They have a nice little graph to show me (very helpful for visualizing). They call out how the spend increase affected other metrics like impressions, clicks, CTR, etc.
This is likely the main drive and they’re spot on showing it first. An increased budget is the most likely driver of increased spend. Some will say this is too obvious, but given how difficult the change log is to navigate and understand I think this is great.
Now they start digging into search interest and how that might also be impacting results. Most of these are small, but this is helpful if I’m considering another budget increase.
With the increased budget, we fared better against several main competitors on outranking share. This is pulling data from Auction Insights, but again, that section is underutilized and the bar graphs here are a great way of visualizing this data (which Google could consider doing in the Auction Insights section, *cough* hint *cough*)
And it wouldn’t be Google if they didn’t slip a recommendation in here, especially when it’s telling me I could spend more if I increase the budget further.
This may seem repetitive, but if you look carefully this breaks down performance in a specific ad group that was heavily responsible. Very smart.
And Google goes even deeper here, looking at specific keyword-level data too:
Very thorough and really digs down to get details for the advertiser.
And the final section shows the elements they identified as part of the change. It also shows you all the elements that are NOT part of the change (in their opinion).
Conclusion
Advertisers have a lot of pay attention to and the Google Ads interface is really data-dense. However, with an assist from AI they are trying to identify variations in performance and provide in-depth explanations around what may have caused the change. So get in your Google Ads account and go see what Google’s AI is flagging for you.
