Here is an example of the swings in traffic I will see from this 1 site:
Day 1
5,000 impressions
25 clicks
Day 2
70,000 impressions
300 clicks
Day 3
30,000
100 clicks
Although my CPM bid, budget, etc. stays the same, the traffic has huge swings up and down each day.
Any tips on getting maximum exposure from the site, and has anyone experienced this? (The obvious answer is to raise CPM, however, it appears as if I have days where I am getting "full" exposure with my existing CPM - so I feel like raising the CPM may not be needed).
Day 1: Set up site targeting - starts running towards end of day - accumulates 5,000 impressions.
Day 2: Runs all day on targeted site - accumulates 70,000 impressions.
Day 3: Owner of targeted site examines stats for previous day - sees unwanted Ad using significant portion of advertising space and blocks it using competitive ad filter. Ad no longer showing after a further 30,000 impressions are accumulated.
Of course this is just a possible explanation and assumes your data is exactly as you describe.
You need to remember that most of what happens to your stats for the content network, whether it is site targeted or not, will be to do with sites other than your own and the actions of other people - possibly in response to seeing your ad, possibly not.
Unless you have a large number of different ads showing on a large number of different sites, then you should not expect to see any stability in the data.
Thanks for your response. The 3 days above are not just 3 days, but rather I am seeing these types of fluctuations over many days, ups, downs, etc.
If they filtered my site out, I would assume impressions would go away.
So, I am getting traffic/impressions from this site in question, however, I couldn't guess as to how many impressions to expect any given day.
Hope this clarifies.
[edited by: da_clicks at 6:19 pm (utc) on Jan. 4, 2007]
Nevertheless, my suggested scenario illustrates how it is the actions of others, and changes to other sites that will affect your site targeting stats. In general, you can have no visibility of what is happening that causes these changes.
Almost certainly there is a small sample size issue here. You may have quite a large number of impressions, but essentially these are the result of your ad appearing on a relatively small (possibly very small) number of pages.
There is a variety of reasons why the number of visitors to any given page may vary dramatically from day to day (for my own site, there is a very clear weekly cycle - mid-week traffic is double week-end traffic). Unless you are targeting hundreds of different sites, then I would expect any statistics from site targeting data to be very variable.
It is unlikely a busy or popular site is getting weird traffic fluctuations unless there is something specific, be it a link from a hot site or some other kind of temporary influence to drive traffic.
Personally I would be very suspicious of any site that had wild traffic variations from one day to the next without any clear reason why. First I would investigate the site and see if there is anything on the site that might be attracting special attention at that time. Beyond that I would assume something shady is going on somewhere in terms of how they are driving traffic.
Certainly over a period of a few days you might see some crazy things, but if the sites traffic is constantly fluctuating over weeks or months, then something is amiss.
Personally I would be very suspicious of any site that had wild traffic variations from one day to the next without any clear reason why.
It would depend very much on the site and the Ad campaigns. It is quite possible that most of this variation could be attributed to, say, a single AdGroup with an Ad on the content network. On one day, that Ad may appear on a site with a great deal of traffic, the next day perhaps it doesn't.
But "yes", you should be able to start seeing the cause of the fluctuation by examination of the statistics.
Personally I would be very suspicious of any site that had wild traffic variations from one day to the next without any clear reason why.
Keep in mind that site targeted does not mean "run of site." Since site targeted ads are basically bidding against all other ads -- both regular text ads and other site-targeted ads -- the only thing da_clicks is seeing is variations in the ad impressions -- not site traffic.
