Ad Words Frustrations

[300m]

I am starting to feel down about Google Ad Words. I have been raising my bids and getting extremely aggressive and my cost keeps going up but my ROI is basically stagnant. I am fully aware of on page factors, target audiences, and ad descriptions, but I feel as if something shifted in March that I can not put my finger on. I could accept that competition is snuffing me out on some terms, that is to be expected, but I watch that stuff like a hawk and that does not seem to be the issue.

So my question is: Can anyone think of any changes that occurred in March with regards to AD Words?

I would greatly appreciate any kind of insight.

[James_WV]

Hi 300M - I'm in travel, so it could be different for my niche, but I currently manage almost a million phrases - which gives me a lot of data to digest - I'm seeing nothing with regards to anything happening in March onwards.

We're getting more impressions / clicks and therefore higher cots - but that's translating into a lot more business (in fact, last month was our highest profit and ROI of the year so far).

Are you looking at your conversion tracking through adwords or analytics? The only thing I can think of at the moment is that Google made some changes in March in how analytics tracks adwords data which a lot of people (including myself) missed at the time...

[ogletree]

Adwords is a lot of work. Are you looking at your analytics to find negative keywords? Analytics can also give you new ideas for new phrase and exact matches. Are your quality scores at least all at 7/10? You should have quite a few 10/10 as well. If you don't you need to be expanding your number of ad groups. Do you do A/B testing? You should be doing A/B testing every week. When you do A/B testing only test small changes. Your ads should only have one thing different. You should only best testing 2 different ads per ad group. Any more and the test won't be accurate.