Content Total going nuts

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Content Total going nuts

Sudden surge in display of ads for content matching.

tenerifejim

9:46 am on May 23, 2004 (gmt 0)

After a week of having my account offline (not showing) google was telling me I have a CTR of 0.6. That's odd, I thought, because normally is is 2.5 - 3.

I checked on an ad group and found a massive surge yesterday for content matching, which seems to have an incrediably low ctr. An ad shown only 700 times in google yesterday (for the right ctr) was shown an increadible 14,000 times as content matching. For only 4 clicks.

Now I cannot believe these figures are correct. Firstly the idea that I have 14,000 ad shown and secondly that only 4 people clicked them.

I checked another group and found similar. 1400 search matches, 6000 content.

I have never had this before. Normally my content matches are quite good.

Has google changed the algo for showing content matches?

Robsp

11:16 am on May 23, 2004 (gmt 0)

Jim,

You most likely got picked up by a new site on your specific market. The number and conversions are quite "normal" for some content sites. Check you logs to see where it comes from.

tenerifejim

8:47 am on May 24, 2004 (gmt 0)

Robsp, Thanks for response. It is a posibility. If that is so, there must be one hell of a website just gone live with adsense displaying ads for my site. I don't know anyone in on this topic doing more than 3,000 visitors a day.

Robsp

1:16 pm on May 24, 2004 (gmt 0)

Jim,

This often happens when the matching is not as good as it should be. We have had 500k impressions on a market where only 500 customers exist. Adsense is not perfect, just make sure U do not pay to much and move the adgroup to a new campaign if you think you do.

Need3lives

3:47 pm on May 24, 2004 (gmt 0)

Also, keep in mind that content match ads generally show 4-5 ads at a time. So, each impression you receive also has impressions for 3 or 4 other ads. This lowers each ads effective CTR generally, since you are still competing against other ads similar to your own.

tenerifejim

4:05 pm on May 24, 2004 (gmt 0)

To be honest guys, I don't really care about CTR on content sites, without a lot of fiddling there's not a lot I can do, especially since it doesn't affect the strength of the keywords.

I have however checked out the logs as robsp suggested and found a couple of entries from a large company that is about as related to my website as a website about apples is related to a website about scandinavian moss.