Bug With Google Ads Discovery & Performance Max Campaigns & New Placement Reports

Google Ads confirmed some sort of bug with Discovery and Performance Max campaigns that are a “significant subset of users.” It is unclear what this bug is, but it started last night at around 11pm ET. Also, George Nguyen at Search Engine Land spotted that Google released new placement reports for Performance Max campaigns.

Discovery and Performance Max Campaigns Bug

Google wrote that on January 21, 2022 at 4:07 AM UTC “We’re aware of a problem with Google Ads affecting a significant subset of users. We will provide an update by Jan 21, 2022, 8:00 AM UTC detailing when we expect to resolve the problem. Please note that this resolution time is an estimate and may change. This issue is affecting Discovery and Performance Max campaigns”

Google has issued another update that “We are continuing to investigate this issue” but has no details yet on what the specific issue is.

Any of you seeing the issue?

Update: Here is Google’s statement “our team uncovered a temporary technical issue that affected serving on YouTube inventory between January 18 and January 21 for a subset of Discovery campaigns and a small portion of Performance Max campaigns. We have resolved the issue and everything is now working as intended.”

New placement reports for Performance Max campaigns

George explained that Google Ads has launched placement reports for Performance Max campaigns where these new placement reports can be generated to see where ads have served for Performance Max campaigns as well as how many impressions those ads obtained.

Google sent Search Engine Land this statement, “Placement reports for Performance Max campaigns are a new reporting resource for advertisers to easily see where on Google’s channels ads have served and associated impressions. We created these reports to give advertisers more transparency and assurance around where their ads are showing.”

Chris Ridley shared this on Twitter on this topic:

🙌Google Ads launches placement reports for Performance Max campaigns
Source: https://t.co/hmTiyuqdCV

“Unfortunately, the data only shows where ads have served and their impressions — not click data. ” via SEL

This is where you’ll find the report.#ppcchat pic.twitter.com/BbDQiz4DjD

— Chris Ridley (@C_J_Ridley) January 21, 2022

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Forum discussion at Twitter.