September AdWord Traffic Quality

[WW MemberName]

Hi all,
Did anyone experience a decrease in the quality of traffic in their AdWords campaigns in the first two weeks in September? Seems like our ROI on this traffic was poor compared to the end of September, and beginning of October traffic figures? Was it possible that Google was testing different traffic feeds?

Thanks,

[Pengi]

Looking at my "big picture" over the past 3 months, there are a number of patterns I can see. However, it does look as though the 2 weeks from the end of August to about 9th September are a little different.

Over the past 15 weeks I see:

1 A very clear weekly cycle: Satuday is my lowest day evry week - only achieving about 50-60% of the traffic I see mid-week.

2 A steady increase from week to week - I though this was due to adding lots more content - but the increase has continued for a month after I stopped adding the new pages.

3 the 1st full week in September is clearly falling short of the "trend line".

Looking at my stats a bit closer - the period concerned appears not only to have had less traffic, but also a significantly reduced CTR (I recall starting a thread on this at the time - I was assured it was due to the holiday weekends). This would seem to correspond with your "poor quality traffic" comment. However - the traffic that did convert showed a higher ROI than I normally see.

Its all water under the bridge now - my site performance has improved steadily since.

[xor0]

Yes I saw lower conversion rate first half of September, but seems to be back to normal now.