What to check before you touch anything
- Is the goal (target CPA and conversion type) really identical across the campaigns you're considering merging? If the targets formally match but the campaigns actually serve different products or audiences, merging could blend inconsistent segments into a single optimization.
- Why were these campaigns split in the first place? If the split was deliberate — separate budget control, different keywords, different regions with different economics — merging for the sake of faster learning could undo the very control the split was meant to provide.
- How much conversion volume does each campaign generate on its own, and is it already enough? If each one is already gathering sufficient data, slow learning may not be a raw-data problem at all — worth ruling that out first.
- Do these campaigns overlap in keywords or audience? If so, before merging, they may have been quietly competing against each other for the same traffic — merging in that case removes internal competition, not just "adds up" the data.
- How important is separate budget control and reporting across these campaigns for the business? Merging reduces that granularity — it's a real trade-off, not a free speed-up.
Possible approaches
- If the campaigns were split historically without a strong reason (say, left over from an old account structure) and their keywords/audiences are similar, merging into one campaign with a shared budget is often justified and does genuinely speed up data accumulation for smart bidding.
- If the campaigns are split for a meaningful reason (different regions with different economics, different products with different margins), a middle ground is a portfolio bid strategy — one shared bidding strategy across several campaigns with a single goal, which pools the learning while keeping the campaigns separate for structure and reporting.
- Google itself confirms that consolidating data (via merging campaigns or via portfolio strategies) can speed up exiting "Learning," but doesn't offer this as a universal recommendation — it depends on why the campaigns were split in the first place.
- If you go ahead with a merge, it's smart to do it gradually and preserve history (move ad groups into an existing campaign with accumulated data, rather than starting from scratch) so you don't lose the progress already made in learning.
- If the real reason for slow learning isn't a fragmented structure but simply low total conversion volume across all the campaigns combined, merging won't solve the underlying problem — it's worth revisiting the more basic questions (is the target realistic, is the budget big enough, is there enough demand in the niche) instead of restructuring.