Low Traffic Weekend?

[suzyvirtual]

I have had really low traffic from adwords this weekend. Down by 50% in my main campaign, and down by about 25% all others. I am attributing it to beautiful weather and back to school shopping keeping people away from their computers. But, I would feel better if someone would confirm that they are experiencing something similar--
ie that the "problem" is more or less network wide, and not an individual prob in my account.
Thanks!
S

[diamondgrl]

Interesting that you should remark. In another forum, there is a raging debate going on about a precipitous drop in Google search referrals since Thursday or so. Check it out here: [webmasterworld.com...]

It's possible there is some correlation - i.e. less traffic on Google. That, however, seemed less probable than other theories, such as that the Google search algorithm changed, disrupting a lot of sites that used to get steady referrals Google.

[edited by: skibum at 6:12 pm (utc) on Aug. 8, 2004]
[edit reason] made link live [/edit]

[suzyvirtual]

very interesting! Thursday is exactly when my traffic dropped, although it is almost exclusively adwords traffic, my natural results traffic is too low to really derive any decent statistical data about.

[walkman]

very strange. Here are the possibilities:

1. Google lost 50% or so market share in a week. Unlikely
2. Large sites that use adwords got hammered this update, and sites that now have the new traffic don't have adwords yet. Most likely IMO.

3. .....

whatever it is I hope it gets rolled back (selfish reasons of course). Hopefully the result quality is effected so much that Google feels the need to undo it.

[suzyvirtual]

#3 might be that the top natural search results for my terms are more relevant now, thus less eyeballs are drifting over to the right where the scroll bar and the ads are.

[walkman]

"might be that the top natural search results for my terms are more relevant now"
50% better? I doubt but it may a combination of both. Google hammered tons of huge sites this weekend.

[GrantNZ]

I'm a watcher of RankPulse to see how agressive the Google index is changing.

[Gmorgan]

Could it be because August is the beginning of the summer period? My site is B2B and figures have fallen across the board.

Oddly enough my conversion rate through AdWords this morning has been the best I've ever had.

[sem4u]

One site's campaign was down to just a trickle, one was slightly down and two were average. It has been very hot in the UK this weekend so this may be the reason for a fall in the number of clicks.

[hdpt00]

I noticed a considerable down turn, down about 20% from the previous weekend. And all my traffic comes from AdWords, CTR was the same and such.

I think you're right about the nice weekend and back to school shopping.

[HughMungus]

Not only back-to-school shopping but also, in my state, we just had "tax-free weekend" where they don't tax clothing and back-to-school items for a few days. I don't know if other states do it, though.

[suzyvirtual]

we had no tax weekend here too. i can assure you that i stayed OUT of the stores and away from the mayhem.
An update though, my traffic seems to have returned to almost normal as of monday, so it seems that it was just a poopy weekend and not particularly related to any other google issues.

[Robsp]

Prepare for a 2-week major traffic dip, called the olympic games 2004....