However, from the beginning of March, my ROI has dramatically declined, while my Adwords costs have moderately increased.
I haven't touched anything, neither in the web site, nor in the Adwords campaigns.
Unfortunately, now I'm losing money. Have I suddenly exhausted my market? Has the quality of Adwords traffic decreased? Has anyone experienced a similar scary scenario recently?
Couple of reasons why this might be happening, and you are not alone. My clients have seen declining conversions and escalating prices as well - others' have said the same here as well....all starting around the end of February.
Yahoo-Overture is losing advertisers at an incredible rate these days - and so people are shifted more and more of the budget to Google Adwords. When you have more advertisers competing essentially for the top 3 horizontal spots, you will see lower sales conversion percentages and higher CPC prices.
However, Google has been adjusting their CPC algorithm in their favor for some time now - and this will likely get worse before it gets better. Not much you can do really.
I haven't touched anything, neither in the web site, nor in the Adwords campaigns.
pmurillo, this is just my opinion, so please take it for what its worth. ;)
The AdWords program has grown substantially in the past two years, and your competitors are both more numerous and more sophisticated - having an additional 2 years experience to draw from.
Seen in this light, I think you are not doing yourself any favors by not changing anything in either your ad campaigns or on your site. I'd really advise constantly testing, monitoring, learning, and revising as being important keys to continued success.
AWA
I have noticed a trend towards fewer horizontal paid listings. For example a term that had 3 'top' horizontal
spots may now have 2....terms that had 1 may just have righthand side paid ads.
Hard to say why this trend is happening. If a term has zero horizontal paid ads, Google is basically 'walking away' from the majority of the click money for that term - I say this because it's well documented that the ads on the right hand side receive only a fraction of the clicks if you were say one of the horizontal spots.
Now Google has a finanical incentive to reduce the number of horizontal paid spots from say 3 to 2....It's supply and demand, you really have to be in a top spot to get a decent click volume, and as we all know, Google change any percentage of your max. bid.
Hope this helps, like I said I have seen a trend towards less horizontal ads.
By the way, has anyone else been having a record low conversion day :)
pmurillo, this is just my opinion, so please take it for what its worth.
AWA, usually I don't do much posting here (busy keeping up to date with changes), but I have to say, Google Adwords has had an "all of a sudden" drop in ROI in March on my side too. We're talking normally about $500 spent a day, and roughly 400% ROI, and all of a sudden it fell apart. It was so bad the other day that I actually lost money, that was the first time in about a year that I lost money in Google Adwords. I also noticed a spike in competitor terms as well for just one day. I would say that it's just a shift of some kind, but I can speak for others when I say that this is "all of a sudden".
Yahoo-Overture is basically done for any legitimate long-term advertisers - most have shifted their entire online advertising budgets to Adwords.
This unfortunately makes Google's 'near monopoly' even worse for advertiser. Prices are out of control and now Google has a huge surge of competitor click fraud.
This whole Pay Per Click game is out of control, Google and Yahoo are not doing nearly enough to police click activity and award credits. Google needs to increase their proactive monitoring of click fraud, it's not enough only to research advertiser complaints.
Not sure how this whole 'game' as I like to refer to it will play out, but I'm certain things for advertisers' are going to get a lot worse before they get better.
Have been doing a lot of testing in my adwords campaign; trying different keywords, links, and ad text. This all cam about because I too saw a loss in my ROI and thought I had made one change to many. Guess it was not just my change, but maybe more of a Google change?
I think they are scrambling too fast to diversify and their core revenue stream - Adwords appears to be suffering.
Sounds like what I was complaining about in Nov and Dec.... then Jan and Feb were HOT. March has been good but have had many days where my CTR went way down and conversions were down... Still making money. I'm 98% content network..
For what it is worth AWA on your comment on constantly changing......
I beleive the oposite.... I do better when I've setup a campaign and get it to where I'm making money....then I leave it be..... I now have campaigns that have not been touched for 2 years....and are still making excellent returns.
They have good times and bad times. Personaly I've found in the long run it is more dificult to make money if you are always making changes.....having to wait for ads to get approved...sometimes it is easy to make a rash decision just because you had one or two bad days.....
Thats just my experience though....
heyday
I believe that Google also periodically stops displaying horizontal ads at some time intervals (20-30 minutes). What this does overall is lower everyone's CTR ..... which ultimately drives up the average CPC.
Basically, more people click on the natural organic search results rather than right side ads .... unless there are top ads showing (they have an overall higher CTR in general).
Just my own observations.
Sounds like what I was complaining about in Nov and Dec.... then Jan and Feb were HOT. March has been good but have had many days where my CTR went way down and conversions were down... Still making money. I'm 98% content network..
