Made very few changes to my account recently, compared to earlier times.
What's going on? Statistically, it makes no sense.
Israel
I haven't checked to see if the drop in impressions is the similar for exact, phrase and broad match keywords. I have been thinking that maybe they have "tightened up" broad matching. But my conversion rates sure haven't gone up which I would expect from tigher broad matches.
ctr has been relatively stable throughout, which means that total clicks is also down about 35%.
haven't made any adjustments to the account that would account for this. the only major changes were the addition of new adgroups.
[adwords.blogspot.com...]
April 26, 2006:
Starting today, and over the coming weeks, we'll be implementing an ads quality change designed to show fewer ads on queries for which our users might prefer not to see them and more ads on queries for which ads are useful. The impact of this change will vary from advertiser to advertiser, so we wanted to give you a heads-up and suggest that you keep an eye on your keyword performance over the next few weeks
My IE browser has shown these results consistently for the past few days while my Firefox browser has shown the normal results.
Thanks for the link to Ads quality and you. I had glossed over that a couple of weeks ago, then couldn't recall where I read it.
As I said above, impressions are half, CTR is double but little profit.
My analysis, FWIW:
and fewer ads when we think that users might not want to see them.
That may explain the high CTR. Modesty aside for a moment, when I check my ads, I'm often the only listing in my segments showing a "real" ad. The others tend to be "off the mark" ameteurish dynamic listings.
I suspect they're inexperienced advertisers since they often don't take advantage of the Capitalization Options available to dynamic insertion. One ad I continually see promising the searcher anything they search on repeats the identical dynamic text on both description lines. This sort of sloppiness cheapens the listings overall in the searchers' eyes, IMHO.
I'm not sure what was wrong with the "old" way. I shared ad space with about 1/2 dozen quality ads, each of us taking a reasonable portion of the conversions. I suspect that the healthy competition I used to see declined to meet the mininum bids or abandoned Adwords altogether.
It's just.... it was such a happy marriage between Adwords and I for a few years, I can't bring myself to give it all up. However, I have been visiting and building up MSN Adcenter on the sly ;)
If you notice a decline in impressions or clicks on some of your keywords, you may wish to ensure that your most important terms are each specifically entered as keywords in their own right, rather than relying on broad or phrase match to include them.
To a cynic, it sounds like Google has given up on trusting its own algo to properly assess broad, expanded broad and phrase match. Like some less sophisticated 2nd tier engines I've tried, Google sounds like it's taking the "safe" road and only matching your keywords if the match is exact or near exact.
For instance, I've noticed in my logs over time that I get an inordinate amount of searches for the single term "will". I've got nothing to do with last wills and testements, etc. The only use of "will" is as a verb in a handful of search phrases. C'mon Google, can't tell the difference?
----
While it's a morale boost to be able to commiserate with other experienced advertisers in this thread about our common dilemmas, I wish we were talking about something else.
Thanks,
Israel
April 26, 2006:
Starting today, and over the coming weeks...
i analyzed this issue very closely when it came out, but my decline started well before 26 april. although it might be a component of the decline, i don't think it explains everything.
