Target Spend Bidding Strategy takes too long

[Jose Balius]

Hello,

We are currently using the Adwords API to launch campaigns for our customers using the target spend bidding strategy to maximize clicks for a given budget. All of our campaigns have a start date and end date. We are finding out that on random campaigns that we run, we never get impressions/stats because adwords seems to be stuck in the "learning" phase trying to figure out whats the correct cpc to use. We have had campaigns never gain any traction for 5-6 days, which have then expired (due to the end date) so they essentially never worked, it is frustrating.

When we do the exact same campaign manually (via UI) with maximize clicks, the campaigns seem to learn a lot faster and actually do work.

Is there anything you guys recommend to make our campaigns work faster? We have been in touch with some of the adwords support staff and they went as far as recommending us to start the campaigns with a manual cpc and after x amount of time, switch them to target spend so the campaigns would collect enough data.

Adding this functionality adds more complexity to our system as you can imagine, so I wanted to see if anyone else has run into this problem and how they solved it.

Thanks!

[Jose Balius]

Also to add more supporting information all we are doing for target spend (at the campaign level) is this:

val biddingStrategyConf = BiddingStrategyConfiguration()
biddingStrategyConf.biddingStrategyType = BiddingStrategyType.TARGET_SPEND
campaign.biddingStrategyConfiguration = biddingStrategyConf

We are not setting "spendTarget" as we figured it would just use the campaign budget. Another question is, is it going to use the campaign's daily budget or the total budget calculated by (campaign daily budget * campaign days)

Would setting a spendTarget help Adwords with auto bidding in any way?

[Shwetha Vastrad (AdWords API Team)]

Hi Jose, 

AdWords API can be used to create Campaigns similar to how AdWords UI does, but programmatically. It may look like the Campaigns created via API take longer to complete the "learning" phase as compared to Campaigns created in the UI. It'll take AdWords a while to adjust bids for newly created Campaigns and Bidding strategies. Changing bid strategy settings may also prolong the learning period or prevent AdWords from accurately adjusting bids. Since the manually created campaigns were added via UI later on, they can leverage the performance from the learning phase of your other campaigns and thus seem like they are completing the learning phases faster as compared to campaigns created via API. Please see this guide for more details on bidding strategy statuses. This guide provides more details on automated bidding in AdWords.

If you don't set the target spend amount, AdWords will attempt to use the remaining daily budget of the campaign using this bid strategy. Please see this guide for an example on how targetSpend and daily budget are factored into automated bidding. 

Regards,
Shwetha, AdWords API Team.