Google Vehicle Ads Manipulation

[LocalWerks]

Hello DR Brain Trust,

I have been tracking some Google Vehicle Ads quirks on our used car ads over the last 4 months.

tl;dr We are seeing wild swings in monthly click volumes without major changes in budget, bid strategy, or inventory levels and want to see if anyone else is experiencing this

Below is the VLA cost and click graph for the last 4 months for a client of ours. You can see mid-March an upward click trends starts when we first upped our VLA budgets then begins to taper in late April, and have been trending downward ever since. We increased budgets in March due to positive VLA results, but the last two months have been terrible.

I pulled Auction insights for the same time and you can see in the second screenshot below that Vehicle Ads are apparently showing for way less queries than before and this trend start on May 1.

Thanks Google for the kick in the nuts.

 

[growdy]

I have also seen similar behaviour.

Campaigns often start strong, but then drop off after weeks or months.

The only remedy I've found is to rebuild the campaign.

 

[umer.autojini]

I would look at the products, may be a popular brand/model is no longer active and sold.
For the auction insights... sometime the details report under Insights and Report > Auction Insights shows zero data but Insights And Reports > Insights (Auction Insights) widget has data and compare 7 day vs 28 days.

And as #growdy suggested rebuilding or pausing/restarting the campaign could help with clicks and impression. However before that one should look at the actual conversions as you don't want to pay for clicks. When you start a new campaign or restart it will send traffic and get data so the the AI system (Performance Max CPA/ROAS) to be figured out... so by restarting you may be getting invalid clicks.

Alternative options be to update or set higher your Target CPA or Target ROAS (based on bidding strategy) and see if that helps.