Keywords diabled bcasue of bad CTR in last 1000 impressions BUG

My keywords dont even have a chance to get ONE impression!

[ASFx2600]

Im going insane. I have entire groups of keywords that are getting disabled becasue:

"This keyword has been disabled because its clickthrough rate (CTR) for the last 1,000 ad impressions it generated on Google falls below the minimum required CTR."

The problem is that my keywords dont even get a chance to recieve a SINGLE impression before they get disabled, let alone 1000 impressions. Is anyone else experiencing this? This has to be some kind of MAJOR bug. I've tried completely deleting my ads and recreating them, ive tried deleting all the keywords from all my ads and adding them back in, and nothing works.

[edited by: ASFx2600 at 11:02 pm (utc) on Dec. 11, 2003]

[hudson]

edited - posted before I read the message...sorry ;-)

[eWhisper]

When a problem is happening to the extent that it's stopping your campaigns from functioning, you're better off calling G and having them look at the account and giving you some specifics where we can only hazard guesses.

[AdWordsAdvisor]

ASFx2600, your keywords are not getting disabled, they are getting slowed. There is a substantial difference between these two things, which would take many paragraphs to detail.

You will almost certainly have been sent an email with a lot of information. So use that as a resource.

BTW, this is not a bug, it is a performance monitor that is checking the performance of your account for it's last 1000 impressions overall, inclusive of all your keywords. Keywords with zero impressions can be part of a pattern of low performance, and may be slowed. But they will not be disabled.

Most likely you have only a few bad keywords that are causing all the problems, but this is impossible to evaluate here.

The key to success in AdWords is to use very specific keywords, and make sure that the ads that show are highly related to your keywords. Use multiple Ad Groups to make this happen.

Bottom line, in terms of a fix I completely agree with eWhisper, who said:

When a problem is happening to the extent that it's stopping your campaigns from functioning, you're better off calling G and having them look at the account and giving you some specifics where we can only hazard guesses.

I think you'll find that the fix is surprisingly simple, once you've understood the principles of being very targeted, rather than general.

AWA

[cagey1]

Sorry, AdWordsAdvisor, but I too have keywords that show zero(0) alltime impressions, and they are clearly labeled "disabled" in the status column, not "slowed". The Adgroup is humming along nicely despite this, showing an overall CTR of over 2% for the other 100 or so other keywords.

I have 25 Campaigns, hundreds of Adgroups and thousands of keywords, so I haven't had time to contact anybody about this (there are probably less than 20 keywords showing this affect), but the condition does occur.

[ASFx2600]

Actually understand the concept behind using targeted keywords quite well, and all my keywords were doing quite well in the entire month of november. In fact, my best ad is holding steady at 7.9% CTR with a lot of the keywords in the ad staying around 20%. I paused them on december first, and resumed them 2 days ago. Right when I resumed them, they were disabled becasue they all had the red star which means they are disabled according to the description which I stated in my first post. They did not have 1000 impressions before they were disabled, because they were disabled instantly. I was having a problem similar to this in the past, I was told to delete the keywords from ALL of my ads (silly) and that didnt work. I even tried deleting the disabled keywords from my ads completeley and leaving them deleted for an hour, but of course as soon as i put them back in, theyre disabled with no additional impressions. I guess I will contact google and recieve the inevitble canned response. When adwords is working, it's very nice. I can only hope that things get fixed soon.

[widget]

Just wondering if:

keywords with zero impressions can be part of a pattern of low performance, and may be slowed

might be somewhat at odds with being "very specific," at least in some instances?

[ASFx2600]

What do you mean?

[brianmcc]

I've been reporting a similar problem for weeks now. In my case, they're happening with keywords that I've bid on successfully for over a year.

To sum up again: Keyword averages between 300-600 impressions a day and a 3-5% CTR. Then one day, out of the blue, 10,000 impressions are reported and the keyword is disabled. Keeps happening to the same two keywords, which always happen to be my best performers. Most recently, happened on Wednesday. On tuesday, the keyword had 340 impressions. Wednesday, it had 4200 impressions.

I've even put [exact match] on the keywords, and actually seen the impressions INCREASE which seems COMPLETELY counter-intuitive.

Have called Google 3 times, gotten 3 different answers (mostly its, "Well, we don't know. We've seen a jump in traffic throughout all keywords. Maybe Xmas is the reason." To which I always respond, "I can understand traffic going up 2x overnight... but 12x?).

My only solution so far: Keep setting up new ad groups, so I can re-post the keywords. This works for about two weeks, and get normal impressions... until the inevitable 12x jump in impressions hits and I have to start the process over again.

The Google call yesterday ended with the advisor telling me that in his opinion, it looks like some form of click fraud is likely. In the process of making documentation of all this to present to Google.