Alerts

Rolling out. If you do not see Recommendations in the menu yet, your account does not have it switched on.

An alert means something is wrong now. Spending stopped, tracking went quiet, something switched on is not showing. Alerts sit at the top of Performance, then Recommendations, above the suggestions, and they are the first thing to read.

Alerts never get an action button. Every one of them means “go and look”. The cause tends to sit outside the thing the alert names: an expired card, a broken link, a change on your website. A button that turned something off would hide the problem instead of fixing it.

The five checks

This account spent nothing yesterday

The account spent money on most days recently, then yesterday spent nothing at all. The card tells you roughly what it had been spending a day, and the last day it spent anything.

Check first: that your campaigns are still switched on, that their budgets are not used up, and that your payment method still works. An expired card is the most common cause.

This campaign spent money with no conversions

A campaign that has converted before spent a meaningful amount over several days and got nothing. The card compares it against what one conversion normally costs in the account, so a campaign that never converted does not trigger this.

Counting stops a day or two short of today on purpose, because conversions take time to come through.

Check first: a broken link, an ad someone switched off or the platform refused, or a change in the last few days.

No conversions have been recorded

The whole account normally records conversions most days and has recorded none for several days, while still spending.

This is almost always a tracking problem, not an advertising problem, and it tends to start after a change to your website. Until you fix it you cannot see what your money brings in, which also means every other number on this page works from incomplete data.

Check first: that the tracking on your website is still working.

This campaign or ad has not been shown to anyone

It is switched on, it has been running for a while, and nobody has seen it, while everything around it shows normally. For an ad, the comparison is its own ad set. For a campaign, the rest of the account.

Check first: whether the platform refused it, or whether its ad set has stopped giving it any budget. For a campaign, whether its budget or targeting is stopping it from running.

Spending jumped or dropped last week

The account’s spend for the last week sits well outside what it normally spends, compared against the previous several weeks.

This one is not always bad. It fires on a jump as well as a drop, because both are worth knowing about.

Check first: for a jump, that you meant it, for example a budget you raised or a new campaign you started. For a drop, that your campaigns are still running and that nobody lowered or used up a budget by mistake.

Why the last day or two is left out

Several of these checks stop counting a day or two before today. Conversions can take a day or two to attribute, so an account judged on today’s numbers looks broken every single morning. Leaving the most recent days out is the difference between an alert worth reading and a daily false alarm.

This is also why the dashboard never shows today’s data.

Getting alerts by email

You can opt into a daily alert email from Settings. The email is strictly opt-in and covers the same five checks. See Email notifications.