AdWords Starting to Rock!

Traffic Down, sales/leads about the same.

[skibum]

A month or so ago, AdWords traffic took a bit of a dip across a bunch of different campaigns and has stayed there. Oh #$#(*$&! what are they up to now was the initial thought.

Now that the dust has begun to settle, it looks like the ads really are becoming more relevant & not just because they make Google more money but because they perform better for the clients.

There is less traffic and in some cases sales or leads are down but the associated cost is down farther so the campaigns are performing better. Whatever changes were made really seem to be an improvement this time.:)

Anyone else noticing improvements?

[mitchy231]

I could not agree more. About a month or so ago I said the same things (though not out loud) about the drastic dive my campaign was doing. I was seriously considering dropping Adwords and investing more of my time and money in Overture.

I have always been a big fan of G and decided to stick it out for a couple of months. I am very glad I did! Although my total clicks are still fairly low (I have a very targeted campaign), my conversion rate is on the rebound and still climbing. Looks like they do things right from time to time (couch, Unlicensed stock).

[Robsp]

Most campaigns performed better in july and August than in June but as we are getting paid to make continuos improvements it is hard to say whether this is just Google or our tweaking of keywords, ad copy and landing pages.

Overall my customers are happy. One thing which specifically pertains to europe is that we find that during holidays volume is significantly lower but conversions higher (if they take the trouble to search while the weather is nice, they may actually want to buy :))

[ddogg]

I haven't noticed any changes.

[jp_css]

I have noticed a drastic change in Adwords conversions. Also, my Adsense CTR has gone up a few points on all of my sites thus making me more money all around.

[cline]

All I'm noticing is that broad matching doesn't work as well as it used to. One has to be much more specific. For some campaigns that might affect the conversion rate, but I'm not seeing any changes in conversion rates due to this, perhaps because I'm actively managing against it to maintain impression levels already known to convert well.

[philicious]

June totally tanked. Our spend and clicks for the month about a third of normal, and then suddenly in July in picked up again, and we had overtaken our June activity within about 8 days. It turned out to be a better than average month for CTR as well.

[IntegraGsrBalla]

Impressions and clicks have dropped for me.

Earlier this month sales were terreble.

Returning to almost normal this week.

Clicks inclining slightly.

ROI- A little better this week

[eWhisper]

All I'm noticing is that broad matching doesn't work as well as it used to.

I'm wondering if they tweaked the broad match algo again.

It seems that some of the issues with Broad Match Mystery [webmasterworld.com] have been fixed - but not all of them.

It almost seems like the 'common words' or & in trigger a look for regional targeting or set off a different algo search, as the results for 'blue widget xyze' are different than 'blue widget in xyze' (xyze is a nonsensical word just to test the search) for both phrase and broad matching.

[Cowabunga]

Adwords now making a strong comeback for us in August after an absolutely abysmal July. In fact, we shut down Adwords completely out of pure disgust in July.

Monitoring closely, but it appears Adwords is back on track.

C.

[hoosierdraft]

I would agree that Broad Match seems to have been rejiggered again. I spent several hours yesterday adding singular versions of keywords that had previously been only listed as plurals but that Broad Match had shown well. I can see tweaking the natural index algo in secret but as a paying advertiser I would like a headsup on Adword algo changes.

[jkruit]

I was reading about the suddent pick up in July for Ad Words advertisers.

I do not use Ad Words but all of the hits on my websites for relevant key words picked up dramatically in July. The highest for the whole year. So maybe it doesn't have so much to do with Ad Words.

Janine