Just had a really wild call with Google — they said that ~any change~ to a campaign resets learning to ZERO (like a new campaign) for 3 to 7 days. This is big — every serious advertiser makes daily (hourly?) changes and this will be killing performance.

To fathom just how crazy this is — imagine telling your boss or client you're now working 2-3 times a month instead of optimizing every day. See how fast you get fired. Yet that's now 'best practice'.

When asked why on earth they'd design such a brittle system that forgets all data as soon as 1 change is made, he said "our goal is to automate everything about the job and this discourages people from making manual changes". I can't decide if this is suicide or genius.

If your job is only digital media buying I suggest you find another job before you go extinct. Soon the only job will be making new ad creative.

Seeing how much Facebook has automated, with dynamic ads etc (and they have learning mode too), I can only imagine that all digital advertising channels will go fully automated soon.

UPDATE: I got sent an internal presentation referencing smart bidding — makes me think this applies just to those campaigns and not normal ones (would fit with what others in the thread have said). I've followed up again to clarify as I wasn't running smart bidding.

The presentation says it typically takes one to two weeks to calibrate to a new bidding strategy, though that depends on the amount of conversion data present — implies it does not reset to zero as previously advised.

The listed changes that reset learning are:
- Bids / CPA Changes
- Bid adjustments
- Bidding Type Changes
- Budget Adjustments
- Keywords (new and modified)
- Pausing and Activating (reduce budget
to $00.01 if you plan on returning to it.)
- Goal Type Changes

I'm clarifying if this is a complete list, as they previously advised even pausing creatives would reset. Will update this thread when I get more info!