Did I shoot myself in the foot?

Change in adtext leads to dramatic declines

[MediaSpree]

I've been running a campaign on adsense happily for about a year now. 300 clicks a day, within my budget, great! About two days ago I changed my adtext slightly to reflect new things on my site and the worst has happend. 3 clicks in the past two days. Why did I get penalized? Can i revert back to my old ad? Any insight or assistance would be great. (I have an email in to google but no response yet)

[Soze]

Hmmm, well itw ill get knocked from the blue if it hasnt been reviewed. I think it definately hurts, but to what degree I'm not sure. I have deleted and recreated ads many times before I thought about it. Most went back to normal. Most of your quality is in the keyword itself IMO.

Each case is different though. Give it a few more days. 300 - > 3 makes no sense. Did your position drop way down? Can you see your ad now? How many impression?

Unfortunately you cannot undelete an ad. It is also unforunate that you cannot pause ads within an adgroup. Would be much better for test IMO.

[buckworks]

Remember you can have more than one ad running in an adgroup. You don't have to delete a performing ad to test something new; make a new ad and let the two run parallel for a while. You can test several ads if you want. Over time Google will start to favour the ad that gets a better CTR.

To recover from your immediate problem, make a new ad with the old wording and let both ads circulate. It will take a few days for the CTR history to be reestablished, but after that, whichever ad performs the best will get the most weight in the rotation and you should be back to where you were before, or possibly better.

[poster_boy]

I'm basing this experience on search, not content - so, maybe I'm all wet, but it sounds like an editorial review issue from the creative change. Once approved, traffic levels should return roughly to normal.

[vanillaice]

Like someone suggested, never delete an ad until you have another ad ready to step in. If you want to make a change, create a new ad, then wait till it gets approved, and test the CTR on it before removing the first ad. This is good for many reasons, but 2 main ones..

1. Google has been VERY slow at approving ads lately, so if you make a change on an ad w/o a backup, your ad may not be active for 3-4 days at times.

2. If your new ad is a bomb, you can simply keep changing it around until the CTR is better than your initial ad.

A tip - Regarding #2, when your new ad takes over your first ad, create ANOTHER ad and try to take over the new ad. If you keep doing this, you'll keep increasing your ad ctr and quality.