My client wants me to understand why this has happen and what we can do about it.
My theory is that Google changes the adwords algo in some way but looking at the posts made in this forum around that date doesn't seem to support that idea.
My client had not touched his adwords account since the first week of Jan (almost 3 months to the day when the impressions, clicks and sales crashed).
Does anyone have any explanations or evidence to support an adwords algo change around 6th Match?
TIA
Alex
Also, check the average ad position for all the AdGroups, BEFORE & AFTER the crash. See if there is a big difference. A few competitors might have entered the fray knocking out your ads from the search partner sites (or the ads might have slipped to second page of search results).
Keyword impressions for certain businesses can be notoriously seasonal. Perhaps, your client's business falls in this category?
A far as I can work out broadmatch was introduced in Autumn/Fall 2003.
Avg. position is consitantly at approx. 3 both before and after crash, therefore partially discrediting competitor hypothesis.
The client is a publisher and they have found that their business is not overly seasonal, certainly a massive drop in early March has not happened before with both on and offline sales.
Alex
Or did one of your competitors launch an interesting new campaign that made your static one less interesting?
No new competitor campaigns as far as we know.
Alex
...in April till the present date they plummeted by 40%. When I look at the impressions and clicks from adwords for this period I see a sudden crash of also approx. 40% from the weekend of the 6th March 2004 onwards.
alexswalker, I'd also consider contacting AdWords support and asking them to let you what, if any, changes were made to the campaigns, country or language targeting, partner site choices, Ad Groups, Ads, daily budgets, Max CPCs, keywords, etc., etc. at around the time you mention.
I do recognize that your client says no changes were made. Still, I'd ask support to review the change history. I often speak to advertisers who don't recall making any changes, only to find lots of them in the change history.
And a few simple changes can have a big impact on your numbers. For example if you opt out of appearing on all partner sites, then you go from appearing on (potentially) many hundreds of sites in one moment, to showing on Google alone in the next moment. This has the potential to have a huge impact on your impressions, as you may well imagine.
Or, cutting a daily budget in half, can cut your impressions in half. Changing a really good ad into a really bad ad can have a similar impact on your click thrus. And so on.
And lastly, making changes to the site itself - that make it less friendly or easy to navigate - or sending a user to the wrong page on your site can have a big impact on what folks do once they get there. (AdWords support can't help you pinpoint changes here, of course.)
So, it's worth checking for changes, IMO.
AWA
<edit> Added the bit about changes to the site itself.</edit>
[edited by: AdWordsAdvisor at 4:25 pm (utc) on July 16, 2004]
Alex
