I think I'm going to just email technical support and ask them to provide me with the number of impressions a given keyword must reach before it causes the "3 for $5 Slowing" as well as a list of my current keywords which are a problem.
I have one campaign at 1.1% CTR, one at 0% with 56 impressions given out since I created it, and this same damn one I've been struggling with and gotten up to 0.34%. That's a good number of keywords higher than 0%, and I'm finished trying to pick which ones may or may not generate a click or two tomorrow. My top keyword was 0/56 today, but my second was 1/44 giving it a 2.7% CTR. If the 0/56 keyword -is- the problem, how do I know it wouldn't have gotten two clicks tomorrow?
Nah I'm just pulling my ads from the search network. This is the fourth time my account has been slowed in seven days. While I can maintain upwards of a .6% average out of 50,000 impressions in two days on the content network (and all of those are from AdSense keyword farm sites), I can't get a single click out of 300 impressions in two days on the search network. I got two on Sunday, but they were both from the same IP.
All of my ads have basically an even CTR - I don't have a single one that's not been clicked at all. I had created 8 ads and intended to allow "the strongest" to win, but I ended up splitting two into their own campaign and taking some of their keywords with them. That one's had 1 click out of 66 impressions in two days.
As for CPC, I wouldn't even know where to begin. My understanding was that cost scales with impressions, and if I want a keyword that costs $100 to be #1 on, and I bid $0.05, I can happily sit at the bottom of the list and hope that someone does find my MUCH more targeted ad. (Many people claim to offer discounted widget maintenance if a person prepays for a yearly plan, but only one person has and advertises the domain name "DiscountYearlyWidgetService.com" - know what I mean? And no, my domain name is not THAT God-awful).
Anyways, if Google wants $5 for slowing me out three times a week, and won't tell me which keywords I need to pay more for, guess what my response to that is going to be :P
I'll just hope that one of these AdSense farms generates me a real sale - or heck, maybe I'll create one myself ;)
I was actually thinking about building a legitimate PHP based "directory" for people that offer the same service I do, with "premium" listings for those who are willing to pay a little bit. At this point, that looks like both a better advertising venue and source of income - I'm done spending six hours a night after work on AdWords.
CPC's - if you let an ad lie down on page 6, realistically you can't expect it to make it's own way to the top, nor can you expect people to find it to click on it. I'd suggest that you expend a little more CPC on making the ad work - if it really is very targeted then you'll get a high CTR and you'll be able to lower the cost somewhat after a while.
If you don't give your ads a chance, you'll never know. ;)
edit_g - why would I expect it to go to the top, or want it to? Is that the way this is supposed to work, we're all supposed to be in a feeding frenzy?
When my ad sits on page six and has all three words the person's search for in the title AND domain name, does it get clicked? Absolutely, yes. Now, that may only be 4 clicks, but what - am I going to pay good money to put my ad out above keyword spammers?
Google wants to slow me because my ads aren't relevant, they claim - and you seem to support that. I contend that I'm being slowed because for some reason people are clicking through six pages of ads and then hitting mine when they see it.
If this were about relevance, Google would slow the accounts of all those in front of me with lower CTRs (although, over time, this ad has had a lot of exposure so it's probably got a low "career" average). No, instead they want to clear me out so they can bring the link up that's underneath me:
[clipped]
Super-relevant, I promise you. You know what that is? That's the source of two of my most recent content clicks (albeit different domain names and affiliates in the query string), and it's the target of an ad just a couple below me (again, different affiliate and domain name).
That's one smart fellow. He's using AdWords to advertise his AdSense keyword farm. In fact, hrrrm. If that URL shows my ad on the content network, and it sits below me on the search network (edit_g, by "search network" I mean all the Googles around the world), can anyone explain the implications of that? I don't quite understand the system well enough to say, but if Google can't track two clicks from the same IP in a row, they sure couldn't track a person using AdWords and AdSense to jack up at least the daily cost of another person's AdWords campaign who sat above them in their desired result pages.
[edited by: cyhcto at 3:20 am (utc) on Dec. 16, 2004]
Google wants to slow me because my ads aren't relevant, they claim - and you seem to support that
Don't get me wrong, I'm not supporting anything here, I'm just saying (without knowing the full details) that you're not giving your ad a chance to be relevant because it's so low down. From the AdWords algo's point of view your ads are just taking up bandwidth if they don't get clicked.
And yes - we are all supposed to be in a feeding frenzy - that's why a good adwords campaign isn't very easy to manage in a competetive sector.
I'm not getting into the whole adsense thing - not now, hopefully not ever...
Btw - you should probably take that URL out of your post, otherwise it'll just get removed.
AdWords has proven to be anything but relevant, and that lack of relevance means I lose money because their "content network" is driving people to my site who have no business being there, and it costs me $5 every few days to have my account "Restored to Normal Delivery" when I get 30 or 40 impressions without a click in what must be a very high-value category.
I've found a new service that allows me to buy text links on pre-selected sites, I think I'm going to try that out. It may not generate as many clicks as Google promised to, but certainly only a few of those clicks were even worth a penny. $10 for 20 good, targeted visitors is far better than the $30 I've paid in one week for 250 (233 unique IPs, 14 of those from the search engine and 229 from "partners") clicks that generated nothing but headache, hard work, disappointment, more headache, more hard work, and so on.
This was supposed to be my "hobby project", and between negative match keywords generating 192 impressions in a day, the only two out of the nine messages I've sent that were addressed at all being answered by brainless tech support people who send me a link to an AdWords knowledgebase page I've already had open for two days in another FireFox tab, and these mysterious "account slowings" which occurred the first time from impressions being generated from a paused campaign - which now seem to occur randomly and are never preceeded by so much as a warning about a particular keyword, ad group, or campaign - I'm spent.
I just hate looking at that green campaign summary screen I get after login, wondering if too many people clicked on my ad today which means WAY too many people saw it and I'm slowed, and then trying to figure out a way to take already obscure keywords that started as broad match, then turned to phrase match, then turned to exact match, and now do something to get them to generate far less than the 60 impressions I'm apparently not allowed.
I hate the thought of another inane "AdWords Support" message in my Inbox quoting my content network impression stats as being the reason I'm disabled (got no response to that one either, hehe) or telling me that optimizing my keywords will somehow prevent one of my negative match keywords from showing up in a daily KW report as being the highest impression getter by 3x, and raising that day's impressions in the report by exactly 192 impressions more than I see on AdWord's site. They must think I'm a complete idiot, that I'm seeing this words go In Trial or On Hold, and that I falsified the reports I've sent them or something. When you're trying to get help with a serious bug in the system and the damage it's doing to your pocketbook, "I believe you can fix your ads and your keywords!" actually sounds a little smug.
I hate thought of looking at my site logs to see all the duplicate IPs from googlesyndication.com, and the three referrers that are farming my AdSense listing into their "Click this ad to proceed" garbage, or adding my listing to page full of search results that a moron sees when he can't type a domain properly. And it's 2004 - these scumbags running these things have had to pick some REALLY incredible misspellings, meaning that if someone goes and actually reads anything there they must be only an inch or two above being in a coma. Perfect, exactly my target demographic. Maybe Google should have their employees spend a little less time scrutinizing my ads and a little more time policing the "content" contained on their content network sites, so they can discover that there is none.
And worst of all, I hate the fact that Google made this. I used to think Google was the pinnacle of what the Internet should be - a method to provide the most relevant information with the least amount of sifting through garbage. I worshipped the philosophy of "less is more" and sat in wonder of the creative and innovative solutions they came up with to problems I didn't even know I had.
Now I look at the ads ranked above me, and the "content" that referred clicks to my site, and find that Google has become one of the worst perpetrators of junk information in the entire industry. And my leaving the AdWords program will put a little money back in my pocket, but it won't fix this problem - and that makes me sad.
This "little project for fun" has become anything but - I used to be concerned about SEO for my service's sit in Google's engine, but now that doesn't even seem important. No matter how hard I work, that spot I've earned will evenutally be sold out from under me to someone advertising high-availability services but in fact selling "\/¦@gr@".
Thanks for everything, everyone, but I'm pulling the plug on this one. I appreciate those who've tried to help, and I don't fault anyone who couldn't understand that my problems have not been caused by poor keywords or irrelevant ad text.
It just seems so glaringly obvious that having 24,130 content impressions in one day and 348 search impressions that same day, with an account disabled and no keywords in trial or on hold, that the system's broken. One guy brought up an interesting point... "just because Google doesn't use low CTRs on the content network against you, are you so sure they don't calculate HIGH CTRs and expect more from you on the search network?". He's got a point, since many of the other things Google says about keyword trial periods, etc turned out not to be true.
