The traffic from my google adwords ads has dropped massively ( approx. 40%) between Wednesday 9 and Thursday 10 and have been worryingly low ever since.
Worth mentionning that I didn't make any changes.
Since this affects campaigns that are unrelated I don't believe that its coming from a new competitor.
Has anyone noticed this?
After doing a bit of my own research my guess is that it has do with the way ads are being served..?
I am currently reviewing / deleting ads with low CTR which admittingly is something I never did. Do you think i am on the right track?
It's strange....
It started a week ago for a lot of people. It would naturally affect CTR on at least the content network at the other end.
Our problmes started the day Googled lowered site targeting min to 0.25
heyday
Traffic is only slighly below normal, but conversion has dropped to our lowest point ever.
We tested all other facets that could possibly be responsible -- IP Lookup, Hosting, Competition, etc. -- and came to the conclusion nothing else could account for this. We theorize that it must be something in Adwords.
We ask that every company post what their experiences and theories in this troublesome area are so we can get more precisely at what the problem is.
For now we've turned off Adwords because, for the first time, we are losing serious money.
For the first time in 2 1/2 years are are also losing money.....
Something is just not right here.....
When we talk to our adwords rep we always get the same reply, "There are lots of things that can affect conversions....."
Hopefuly things will correct themselves here like in the past...
hedyay
According to an account manager at Adwords, it is all down to a change we made last week within our top campaign. I basically got rid of an "-" in my display URL. It used to be: www.#*$!x-zzzz.com and it is now www.xxxxzzzz.com.
If that is the true reason, I can't revert back since the former ad text has been lost and can only wait or spend more money on adwords. (see explanation below plus a tip)
"I would like to clarify why the performance of your campaigns has fallen
off since you made changes to your ads. Every one of your keywords ranking
is determined by its Quality Score and its maximum CPC. Your keyword's
Quality Score is determined by your keyword's clickthrough rate (CTR),
relevance of ad text, historical keyword performance, and other relevancy
factors.
Your keywords have two major performance measurements associated with
them; the performance of the keywords themselves, and the performance of
the keywords in association with the ad texts that they generate.
While your keywords have retained their performance history, one part of
the performance measurement has been lost, as your ad text (Display URL)
has now changed.
I completely understand that all that has changed is that a hyphen (-) has
been removed, but I hope you can appreciate that the system is automated,
and it doesn't distinguish between a tiny change in the URL and a
completely new, separate domain.
Please note that you are still in complete control of your advertising
budget and goals. Once your campaigns rebuild the performance history that
they had before, your ad's should return to the level they were at.
Once your account becomes active again, you should see a gradual
improvement in the performance of your ads. The performance history of
your ad texts needs to be rebuilt again.
However, if you don't want to wait, you can, if you wish, raise your
maximum CPC. Doing this will drive your ads ranking up, and is very likely
to improve the performance of your ads in the short term. This will
accelerate the process of brining your ads back to the level they were at
before."
Well, I guess that's what we'll do...
I shall keep you informed...
Content network has been great for us all year then all of the sudden it is just pure garbage....
heyday
Google should warn us about this, i will have to spend the monies with other advertisers now to cover the loss in traffic.
One is back online. Can't wait until their support lines open up this morning!
I am search network only.
Hope it gets fixed soon.
traffic volumes have only gone down around 10% in the last week, but conversions are LESS THAN HALF the average for the last 18 months.
We havent changed anything in our campaigns or on the site, so I'm still looking for explanations.
In the meantime, since Nov 18th, we've been losing money every day. The first time in 18 months,
Kind of interesting you say you've been losing money since the 18th.... that is the the exact day the changes went into effect as far as all content keywords are fair game.
To give you an example...our product is now showing up on sites related to "Cheet Codes" ... it has never done this before....ever..
Low and behold when I search my 50,000 keywords I find one campaign with a keyword cheet code in it.
At least in our case this is our problem.... so you can guess what we are doing today........going through 50,000 keywords....
heyday
