1.7% CTR keyword disabled?

Says "disabled for CTR." Huh?

[JollyK]

Hello, all. Hopefully maybe someone can explain this to me. I have a keyword exact match (as in [some widget]) that has been disabled. However, this month it is showing a 1.8% CTR (1.2% for the last 7 days, 1.5% for all time). When I clicked on the FAQ link, it said that keywords under .5% CTR for the last 1000 impressions would be disabled.

The last 1036 impressions equalled a 1.7% CTR according to the reports.

Since the FAQ says that it's looking at the last 1000 impressions, and since the last 1036 impressions led to a CTR of 1.7%, and since the keyword has been disabled, I have to think that either reporting is incorrect, or the FAQ is incorrect, or that the keyword was disabled for other reasons. (Or that I'm just dreadfully unclear on the whole CTR concept. heh)

In any case, "no unnastand." :-)

In the past, if a keyword has been disabled for trademark reasons (or similar) I've gotten an email, but this time I didn't. Plus, the trademark "widget" is in use in several exact matches similar to the disabled one, and those weren't disabled.

There were no "content partners" or whatever impressions during that time, so I'm pretty sure those were all Google impressions.

I'm sure there's a simple answer to this, but all the docs seem to indicate that if you stay above 1% you're fine. What am I missing?

(Emails to Google unfortunately seem to just get me the part of the FAQ that says "each account is evaluated after 1,000 impressions...must be 0.5% ... yadda yadda" so I thought I'd see if the guru's here know anything.)

Thanks for any info, or pointers to TFM so I can R it. :-)

JK

[JollyK]

Hrm.

Either this is so obvious, everyone is hoping that I find my own FM to R, or no one knows. :-)

Heh.

Guess I'll brave the AdWords support line.

[TomWaits]

A few, total guess, possibilities:

- Your Google.com CTR is below 1.0%. I believe that a word is disabled if the CTR on Google.com is below 1.0%, even if your AOL.com, etc., experience is above 2.5%. Combined, that could equal your 1.7%.

- You have 2 keywords that are basically synonyms or singular/plurals. So you have "keyword" and "keywords". Many of the searches that used to be split between them are now going to "keyword", and for some reason that means "keywords" is disabled. I have a keyword that has a CTR of 3.0% that got disabled, after being out there for over a year, but I believe that the singular is now getting all the traffic, because I didn't lose anything.

[seth_wilde]

I think Tom has it right...

The CTR displayed is across google's entire network. The CTR that google uses to disable keywords is from just google.com. I've had words getting close to 3% CTR that were disabled and this is what the Google reps told me was happening.

Personally I think this is a really stupid setup.. If they're going to disable keywords for the CTR they should at least give you the CTR #'s that they're using so you can gauge progress in writing creatives.

[JollyK]

seth & Tom:

Thanks to both of you. Grr. I agree that the reports should show "just Google" if "just Google" is what's getting you slapped down.

For some reason, since they don't, I guess I thought that "search" was the equivalent of "Google". Still, if they can tell the difference, why do you suppose they haven't given us that capability in the reports?

Oh well.

I guess ... I'll just try to work with the fact that I'm just not going to know what my Google CTR is and try to do the best I can with the campaigns I have. If they disable 'em, that's part of the price of doing business with Google. :-)

I still love Google, make no mistake.

I guess the honeymoon is over, though.

Heh. :-)

JK

[nerowolfe]

We've had the same thing happen a number of times. CTRs seem to vary dramatically among different search engines. With no way to report on the CTRs for particular engines, it's nearly impossible to optimize for Google CTR. It'd be one thing if this only killed off barely adqeuate campaigns, but we have lost keywords with 50+ clicks/day and 3-4% CTRs.

[nerowolfe]

Aaaaaaaargh! It just happened to us again on a keyword that had 8,800 total clicks and a 5.3% CTR. Today we had a 5.7% CTR before the keyword was disabled. Google, this is ridiculous.

[Neil_S]

There's a simple explanation. Google's new AdWords technology is not working properly. We're down 90% on one campaign since the changes of approx. 10 days ago. Nothing we've tried seems to increase click-thros. Just sent an email to Google this morning, demanding they switch back to their old system which worked well for us .... hey if 10,000 people do this, and Google are down 90% on revenue (yes, it's a LOSE-LOSE scenario), they'll be back on the old system pretty soon!

Neil

[cagey1]

I am not sure it is Lose-Lose. Unless Adwords is showing fewer adds for your keywords, somebody must getting your former clicks (and paying Google for the privilege).

[ninhld]

in general, when I got a keyword disabled, I delete it, then add it again, and it will show.