A campaign that spends nothing is not always a bad campaign. Sometimes it is a good campaign that has been locked out of the shop.
A homeware retailer I work with splits its Google Shopping ads by a label in the product feed. Personalised gifts in one place, everything else in another. Sensible. Then I read the feed itself and found a 150cm Christmas garland labelled “Personalised”. Nobody was engraving a name on it.
Neither was anyone engraving the other 1,644 products wearing the same badge. The label sat on 1,828 of 1,905 items. Only 183 had the word in their title.
Here is how one word did that. The rule said a product was personalised if its title included “personalised”, or if its title did not include “personalized”. One operator, pointing the wrong way. Almost nothing in a British catalogue uses the American spelling, so the second condition was true for nearly everything.
The damage was quiet and very polite. The ad groups built to exclude personalised products could only reach the handful labelled as new arrivals, so they spent £0 and looked like weak campaigns. A third label never got a look in at all. Zero items, because the broken rule grabbed them first.
The fix was changing “doesn’t include” to “includes”. Personalised went from 1,828 to 183, and the forgotten label woke up with 25 products.
Nobody would have found this in the ad account. Every bid, budget and target was fine. The campaigns were obeying a map with most of the shop drawn inside the wrong room.
A campaign that will not spend is not always asking for more budget. It is sometimes standing at a locked door, holding the wrong key you handed it.