200% traffic spike in last few days

PPC clicks on both AdWrds & Ov has jumped

[JonBoy]

I'm seeing a massive jump in PPC clicks for Sunday 23rd and Monday 24th. At first I though maybe I was under attack by a fraudster's bot, but now I see it at both Adwords and Overture, and I have no real competition.

Here are my clicks (UK only):

Day *** AdW ** Ov
Mon 24 * 206 * 187
Sun 23 * 151 * 115
Sat 22 * 25 ** 34
Fri 21 * 45 ** 40
Thu 20 * 34 ** 61
Wed 19 * 51 ** 52
Tue 18 * 58 ** 64
Mon 17 * 93 ** 59
Sun 16 * 62 ** 39
Sat 15 * 41 ** 37
Fri 14 * 41 ** 40
Thu 13 * 68 ** 52
Wed 12 * 69 ** 65
Tue 11 * 66 ** 58
Mon 10 * 46 ** 67
Sun 09 * 40 ** 42

The Google Breakdows reveals that it is partly caused by high impressions, but particularly by higher than usual CTR.

Day **** Imp *** CTR
Mon 24 * 9666 ** 2.1
Sun 23 * 5923 ** 2.5
Sat 22 * 2834 ** 0.8
Fri 21 * 4125 ** 1.0
Thu 20 * 5047 ** 0.6
Wed 19 * 5270 ** 0.9
Tue 18 * 6143 ** 0.9
Mon 17 * 7289 ** 1.2
Sun 16 * 4832 ** 1.2

Traffic seems to have really taken off at both in the past 2 days, and I've made not the slightest changes to my accounts. Is anyone else seeing anything like this?

My niche is relgious/spiritual, with keywords not in the slightest war-related.

[edited by: JonBoy at 3:17 pm (utc) on Mar. 25, 2003]

[Shak]

jonboy,

surely your sales/subscriptions should reflect an increase.

it does seem a strange situation, unless there has been some press activity in relation to your industry, try a search on Google News.

Shak

[PRNightmare]

JonBoy,

I noticed about a 65% jump in clicks through AdWords yesterday (Monday in the US). Overture jumped only 30%. Still a big jump for no apparent reason.

[vibgyor79]

Our client accounts saw a 10 to 50 percent increase in traffic across different business categories on Monday.

And all the time, I thought it was the result of changes we made to the campaigns on Sunday :)

[JonBoy]

Shak, you're a genius (or maybe I'm just a fool). Sunday night saw some major TV coverage of my nicche, and I'm very prominent on all the keywords that an interestd viewer would type in.

[martinibuster]

There's another thread going around about the opposite effect: Losing traffic on account of the war. It's hard to come to any firm conclusions because the feedback will tend to cluster around people with similar anecdotes.

Some of the activity could be attributed to a variety of things, depending on your industry and client base. For instance, a surge in sales close to the end of the month could indicate that people are anticipating their welfare checks, retirement checks, etc. It also could reflect the first batch of people receiving their U.S. Tax Refund.

Although I'm not aware of it, there's probably a more reliable way of measuring aggregated sales/traffic figures across a broad swatch of industries, as well as broken down between industries and geographically. Now that would be something to play with on Excel!

[Rhadamanthus]

I'm not surprised that a religious/spiritual site is gaining traffic due to the war. People are seeking comfort during a time of great uncertainty. It's a natural human reaction. And your site could be showing up on searches only loosely related to the war, such as "christianity vs islam", which people would be searching on to find out more about the underlying causes and history, and would turn up sites with either Christianity or Islam as a keyword.

Your numbers don't surprise me at all.

[AmericanBulldog]

I had seen a drop of about 30% starting a few days preceding the war, in the last 3-4 days traffic has increased 20% across most of my sites, we're not where we were but it's coming back.

[Crush]

Same for me traffic up 100 unique vistors per day from the usual and sales are starting to come back a bit. I think people are going to carry on regardless now that the war is on. It will take some real nasty peice of news to stop them buying again.

[cline]

For accounts heavily dependent on PPC I'm seeing a reduction in PPC competition, and a corresponding increase in PPC click through volume. I think the war has spooked some advertisers who don't understand how PPC functions.