So some stats - today, the first ad has over 70,000 impressions and an average position of 4.6. The second ad has only 9,707 impressions but a higher average position of 2.4. For both campaigns i have the allowable budget cranked to like 10x daily spend with identical campaign settings. The ads have pretty similar CTR and CPC costs.
This is totally baffling to me. Shouldn't both ads have close to the same number of impressions? If anything shouldn't the average rank of 2.4 give the second ad more impressions by being shown more often on partner sites because it averages in the top 3? I dont get it. Any insights?
Have bid successfully for over a year on keywords "widget service" and "wiget services". Have enjoyed #1 place and about a 3-5% CTR this whole time.
Usual daily impressions for each keyword was somewhere in the neighborhood of 300-800 impressions.
Low and behold: this week, each rocketed up to over 10,000 impressions a day. This happened (literally) overnight. Of course, my CTR did not follow suit. I went from 3-5% clickthrough to 0.1% clickthrough (again) overnight.
What is more disconcerting, is I have made the words exact matches and yet the impression count is actually increasing!
Google rep had little substanative to say other than: maybe there has been a spike in interest in my keywords. Needless to say, I found this hard to believe. I mean, if impressions doubled over the course of days or weeks, then I could understand. But to go up by an order of magnitude overnight? It seems unliklely.
Not sure what to think. Either expanded broad match is killing me (am I showing up for everything that has the word service or services in it... I can't tell, because Google keeps deactivating me) or there is some bug.
I suspect a bug. Anyone else seen this?
So I was going to wait for some more responses before posting yet another strange observation that surely relates to the weirdness with my ads... but can't wait any longer..
Despite making my budget virtually unlimited and average position showing from the 2.0-5.0 range, my ads do not routinely show in those positions. Sometimes they are nowhere to be found. (I have been checking a few times a day from a couple different machines). Also I see quite an array of ads each time.
The ads almost seem to be rotating and giving people exposure very much regardless of CTR and/or maximum bid. This is a heavily searched term, with far more than 8 people bidding on the term.
To my understanding i thought the top 8 just won out every time, and if you werent in the top 8 you had to crank up your bid or lose out on the traffic. From what i am seeing it sure does not seem that way. Not that a system where you split time based on CTR/max bid (where the best get the biggest chunk but the worst still get a chunk) would be necessarily bad with more than 8 bidders, but [closes brain]
I am so confused =(
(Perhaps i am just ignorant, up until recently i have not bid on 'monster' terms, do the rankings behave differently?)
This is even more interesting given the state of affairs on the Google search side of the equation. I operate a few commercial sites that were blown out of the water by the Florida update and now my Adwords campaigns have stopped driving any business. What in the world is going on over there? Right now Google is a non-factor in my business. I'll just have to rely on other PPCs to make something happen because nothings happening here.
