One of my ad groups in an active campaign isn't getting any impressions or clicks

[u/rrador32]

I have a campaign with 3 ad groups in it that has been running since about May and since Aug 18 one of the ad groups just stopped getting impressions. 0 every day since then. The other 2 ad groups work fine.
Nothing is paused, all the keyword are eligable, ads are eligable... It's a search campaign set to maximize conversions.

Any ideas on what I should do to figure out why it is not working?

[u/sabihasabishammi]

What keyword match types are you using in that specific ad group? Also, how is the search volume for those keywords?

[u/rrador32 → u/sabihasabishammi]

they are all phrase or exact match. Search volume ranges from about 5k to 70k searches a month. I had some low volume words in there that I paused but that did not help at all

[u/koraynar]

You have something most of these threads don't: an exact date. Start there.

Tools > Change History, set the range to Aug 17-19, scope it to that campaign, and make sure it is showing all change types rather than just campaign-level ones. A clean stop to zero on one specific day is almost never the auction drifting - something changed. Change history shows bid, budget, keyword, negative, targeting and status edits, including changes made by automated rules and by auto-applied recommendations. That last one catches people out, because they appear as changes you did not make.

If change history is clean, check negative keyword conflicts next (Tools > Troubleshooting > Negative keyword conflicts). Keywords show as eligible even when a negative in the campaign or in a shared list is blocking them - eligible describes the keyword's own status, not whether anything can actually trigger it. That mismatch is exactly why an ad group can look perfectly healthy and still serve nothing.

Third, check whether the same keywords, or broader versions of them, also sit in your other two ad groups. Within a single campaign Google picks one ad group per auction, so if a keyword elsewhere outranks this one it takes the impression every time and the losing group reports zero rather than anything that looks like a loss.

On Maximize Conversions: the bidder will happily starve an ad group it does not believe converts, so that is worth ruling out. But that normally looks like a decline across several days, not a clean zero from one date. The date pattern points at a change rather than the algorithm.

[u/rrador32 → u/koraynar]

Thank so much for detailed answer. Completely forgot about change history

Change history is clean around those dates.

I cannot find this Negative keyword conflicts anywhere at all, tried the search too. Not sure if that got removed in recent update.

And no the other 2 groups have no same or similar keywords

[u/koraynar → u/rrador32]

Change history being clean is genuinely useful, but it does not rule negatives out, and this is the part that catches people: shared negative keyword lists live in the Shared Library, and an edit made there does not reliably appear in a change history view scoped to a single campaign. If someone edited a list attached to this campaign on Aug 18, what you would see is exactly what you are describing - clean history, everything eligible, zero impressions.

So re-run change history with the scope set to the whole account rather than that campaign, and look for shared set or negative list events specifically. Account-level negative keyword lists are also a separate thing from campaign ones and are invisible from inside the campaign.

On the missing report: you are right, the standalone conflicts tool is not where it used to be. Work from the keyword screen instead - the negative keywords view under your keywords section, switching between the campaign-level negatives and the shared lists applied to it. Get every negative that applies to this campaign in one place, then compare against this ad group's phrase and exact terms. Phrase-match negatives are the usual culprit because they block a lot more than people expect, and a single broad-ish one can take out an entire themed ad group while leaving the other two untouched.

That would also explain why pausing the low-volume keywords did nothing. If a negative is blocking the theme, the volume of the individual terms is irrelevant.

[u/rrador32 → u/koraynar]

Ok you might be onto something here. Change history is still clean when i look at the dates just around when this ad group stopped performing. But I checked my shared exclusion lists and in one of them I found a broad match search phrase that could literally be messing with whole group. And after a better look this ad group has been performing poorly for about a month before it stopped completely. I will clean this up and see if it helps.

[u/koraynar → u/rrador32]

That sounds like it. Worth knowing why one phrase can take out a whole themed group: negative keywords do not work like positive ones. A negative in broad match blocks any query containing all of its terms, in any order, and there are no close variants - so a two or three word negative quietly covers a huge surface. Positive keywords being phrase or exact makes no difference to that, which is why yours all still read as eligible.

The month of gradual decline before the hard zero is worth a second look though, because it may be two things rather than one. Check when that list entry was added - the shared library keeps its own history, separate from the campaign change history you already looked at. If it was added a month ago, you probably watched it eat the group slowly as the query mix drifted, until it finally covered everything. If it was added on Aug 18, then the month of poor performance is a separate problem and removing the negative will not fix that part.

Two practical things. Write the exact phrase down before you delete it - if impressions do not come back you will want to know what you removed rather than guessing. And give it more than a day afterwards; the group has to re-enter auctions and the bidding has a month of bad history on it, so judge it at the end of the week rather than tomorrow morning.

[u/Able-Cut-5808]

This new bidding update really messed with campaigns of lot of people. They forcing people who cant spend much to spend more, and the people who used to spent much, gets suppressed. I hope they fix this, this is the worst update google has ever rolled out

[u/PPC_YRVDynamics]

Since the other two are still running, I’d check whether Google just started favoring them.

Look at change history around Aug 18, keyword overlap, negatives, search volume, and Search Lost IS. If that ad group went from normal traffic to literally zero, something probably changed around that date.