collapsing impressions

Following all the expert advice backfires!

[marc]

I started an adwords campaign for a gift basket business with 20 obvious keywords (KW); result was a few thousand impressions a day for 30-40 clicks/day. (CTR around 0.5-1%). Then I followed the advice in Perry Marshall's book and elsewhere about expanding the number of KWs. I found another 50 or so on Overture, e.g. "wedding gift", etc, etc --> I added lots of expressions, phrases, in brackets, as opposed to single words.
Guess what happened: number of impressions collapsed to a few hundred a day, and CTR almost nil (1-3 clicks a day for 3 days now). Almost as if adding lots of phrases with "gift" had penalized me. Indeed, the word "gift", perhaps a bit general, had done well until these modifications - Now it has zero impressions!
So I get shut down, with the dire warnings about nonperforming keywords - But status is still "high" or "average" for all of them!
I had also changed the ad - but can a bad ad cause a drop in impressions?
How on earth can the number of impressions collapse when I add KWs? Should I remove some? Can changing the ad help?
Many thanks for any thoughts
Marc

[eWhisper]

I had also changed the ad - but can a bad ad cause a drop in impressions?

Changing the ad will put it back into the que to be reapproved. While your ad is awaiting approval you won't be shown on partner serach or content sites. So, changing your ad can lower your impressions.

[RedWolf]

As eWhisper says, changing an ad is bad. Changing it right before a weekend can be very bad since it can kill you until the review staff gets around to it which may be Tuesday. The best way to handle ad changes is to not really make a change. Create a new ad instead and let it run in rotation with the old ad until it is approved and showing on the partner sites. Then you can delete the old ad, or maybe not if it looks like it outpreforms the newer one. You can get a good idea of how they preform by turning the optimization "feature" off and comparing CTR and more importantly conversion rates of the ads.

[brizad]

marc>>>>

The exact same thing happened to me....the CPC went way up and the ad postion and number of clicks went way down. Still trying to figure out what to do.

That's what I get for listening to the "experts."