Unusually behaviour from Adwords

increased price from 44c to 99c and ad rarely appears

[JonnyWales]

I've been using Adwords for a number of months now with pretty good results. One small campaign I have has got two Ad Groups. The first group has just one keyword in paying a max of 44c. The second group has 10 keywords in paying a maximum of 5c.

Having read this board about Premium positioning and doing a bit of experimenting I have increased the max price for Ad Group 1 to 99c and this has moved me from third position to the top of two ads shown in premium positions.

At least this is what happening for about two minutes. It now seems that clicking on any of the keywords, either from Ad Group 1 or 2, does not result in any ad appearing. If I continually refresh the screen then about once in every twenty appearances I see the ad. CTR has been consistently around the 2.5% level for both Ad Groups so it shouldn't be this which is effecting the non-appearance.

I made the changes a couple of hours ago. Anyone got a answer for what is happening?

[chiyo]

JohnnyWales..

not sure I quite understand.. but ive noticed that if you click on ad ad in google, then refresh the page or do another keyword search that would normally bring up the same ad, it does not appear. I always assumed this was to guard against people clicking more than one time on the same ad and trying to "break" a competitor.

If I misunderstood, apologies.

[Mike_Mackin]

Check your daily spend limit
Go to Campaign
At the top under Campaign #
USD $xxx.00 daily budget limit - Edit Campaign Settings

It may be set too low so that adwords will deliver your ad "every so often" as it judges how often to deliver over 24 hours.

[JonnyWales]

The daily spend limit has been increased to the level indicated to ensure maximum clicks.

I've just checked again and when I refreshed the page half a dozan times my ad appeared the first 3 times along with 5 other ads but then dissapeared for the next 3 (the other 5 ads continued to appear).

What I suspect may have happened is that my previous good CTR may have been "zeroed" and the ad isn't being shown consistently because it's performance since the change has not yet been sufficient.

If this is the case then the logic somewhere is wrong as it would penalise you every time you increased your bid or changed the content of your ad.

[Tor]

If this is the case then the logic somewhere is wrong as it would penalise you every time you increased your bid or changed the content of your ad.

Why on earth should Google do that JW?

[JonnyWales]

I've no idea why Google would do this. I'm simply saying what may be the cause for something which is taking place.

My standard ads from the second group have also been effected. These have a max price of 5c and some of them are the only ads appearing for certain keywords. In the past they would appear every time that keyword was used but now are appearing rarely.

[Algebrator]

JW,

I am experiencing something similar - I have been playing
with increasing max click cost, and actually got a
premium listing - no problem there.
However, my ROI went down (paying too much for some kwds,
conversion not as good), so yesterday evening I started
playing around with kwds - splitting them into different
campaigns, having different landing pages for different
kwds etc. As a result, I can not get to premium spot at all
(I am still #1 on the regular adwords). So there might
be something to your statement regarding google's algorithm
reseting good CRT% to 0. I even tried putting it back
to the same setup as I had yesterday, but nothing changed.
For a little while I even set the max click cost to
a ridiculous amount ($10.00) - even that didn't do anything

[ghostMonkey]

I had the same thing. I deleted the ad and created 2 new ones, which worked fine. Then I created a third one, several hours ago, and this doesn't show up at all, just like the first. There's no reason why it shouldn't (budget > recommended, bid several X minimum, UK keyword, no editorial probs, etc.) I hope someone can give an answer to why this keeps happening as there is nothing forthcoming from "support" - emails are ignored.

[webdiversity]

If your ads are in two campaigns they will be treated as seperate campaigns, if they are in different groups they will be treated as being the same campaign and as such any impact on one group will harm/benefit all of them. Using the group facility instead of a campaign is to allow amalgamation of items under one heading, so if you are running a promotion for products and geo-target all 50 states, if you ran seperate campaigns for each state you'd need two accounts, where you can have 50 groups in the one campaign for better analysis of results.

I'm always amazed at the number of people that say "I clicked refresh or F5 50 times and my ad got shown 5 times" don't you realise by doing that you are affecting negatively your own CTR? Each impression counts.

If you have your ad campaign settings right, you don't need to check anything, everything will work perfectly from a display point of view.

People keep trying to second guess about going up top, well personally if I wanted to be up top I'd have paid for the benefit, but in the instances that ads we run get promoted I'm grateful of the bonus that it gives. I don't think anyone will ever crack the magic formula, because there isn't one. If your paying enough money to be on the frst page and the top 2 slots are free then you will get your 15 minutes of fame, along with your competitors, and if you have killer CTR then you might get longer in the spotlight because Google know you get more clicks generally speaking, so a spell up top will be beneficial to them as well as you. But stop checking if you want a better CTR.

[ghostMonkey]

"If you have your ad campaign settings right, you don't need to check anything, everything will work perfectly from a display point of view."

If only...