There's nothing in the much-vaunted "AdWords Support" about this except something about "we want you to be happy, we'll work with you to resolve the problem so you don't have to close your account". Apparently by working with me they mean ignoring me.
Of course, just about everything's misleading in there, so I guess I shouldn't be surprised it's not that I "don't have to" close my account, it's that I "cannot" close it. I don't want to pay these folks another dime, even if they could send me a click for a keyword related to my industry.
Any have a clue how to end this thing? I just want to put this crap behind me. It's really my fault, I thought contextually relevant advertising would be -good- for business - relevancy is to advertising like integrity is to the prostitution industry.
Thanks,
J
I've been slowed three times in the last four days, and now they want their $5.
Once because I let two overly generic keyword go too long. I didn't change the keywords when they were placed in "on hold" status because I thought that there was some "on trial" status they would go in to first - and I spent the three hours between Ad Group updates trying to find them (which I never did). They'd each gone up like another 10% or so in impressions, both around 400, so I just deleted them - but it was too late. A couple of hours later when the main summary was updated, it turned out I was slowed. I kind of thought something had happened though, because I went from two or three clicks to my website every hour to none for three hours. I figured that was my fault though, I should have deleted them right away (I've only seen "on hold" or "in trial" keywords one time since however). That was on Monday night - after remodeling keywords extensively, I clicked the "restore" button and traffic started flowing somewhat normally again.
What I found next has something to do with the problem that hung me up on that first experience, actually - I must have been slowed again, sometime back on Wednesday morning, because my impressions went from around 1000 and about 25 - 30 clicks a day (hey, I was working on it, I'd gotten that up from 22 impressions and no clicks in my first set of keywords), back downto around 300 and not a single click. I actually haven't had a visitor to my website since 10:06AM on Wednesday, which was right about the time I got pulled off the content network (good riddance anyway, when I saw the types of sites that were referring me) and I noticed a drastic reduction in the number of impressions going out, and all of my average positions were about double what the keyword estimator gave me. At this point I emailed Technical Support, because I knew something was up.
This part of the experience really bothered me, because I couldn't find a single problematic keyword - they were all less than 18 hours old, and not one had more than 100 impressions. I had decided that I would religiously delete keywords that had that many impressions and no clicks, or else risk getting snapped back onto that slowed status again - and I did each time. I feared this might take down the perceived "relevance" of my ad (when I tested with a google search once or twice I -always- got known competitor's sites on the first 6 or 8 pages, all above mine, and the majority of the ads were actually relevant - in contrast to what I've found since).
I started to think maybe I wasn't going to be allowed to not strive for the number one spot, and instead run a "cheap" campaign being happy that my perfectly relevant link was on the third or fourth results page (another rule of mine was not to accept a keyword with a predicted position less than 5.0, no matter how appealing the click count seemed).
I emailed tech support again, still no answer, so I really started digging. All of my keywords added up to half my normal daily budget if I got the expected amount of clicks, all the positions were 4.7 or higher, everything looked great. Regardless, I worked and worked to get my impressions up and get back out into the content links, since I'd only had a few Google search clicks compared to the 200 or so I'd gotten out of content, which at the time made it seem pretty important to be back out in content.
Then out of the blue I got a "slowed" notice Thursday afternoon, and in about 30 seconds I found the problem. I'd played with creating a seperate campaign last Saturday night, the first full day I'd used AdWords. I got 13 clicks out of 1000 impressions, and I was digging it. I used an old CommissionJunction login I'd had to find a fun link - since it's Christmas time, I chose a service offering to send kids letters from Santa. CJ's updates are so slow I'm not sure if I ever made a sale, but I got an ad into the number one spot for three hours and I was pretty happy. Then I paused the campaign, and forgot about it until I switched from viewing "Only Active Campaigns" to viewing all campaigns.
The paused Santa Letter campaign had over 1000 active keywords in it - all with 0 impressions, 0 clicks, and most in "On Hold" or "Trial Status". I was -hot- because I thought paused campaigns didn't run ads. I fired off like another 5 emails to tech support, nada. I'd never even received a notice about it, and I began to think that might have been the problem for the last couple of days, and I just never -had- been notified, and maybe since whatever bug was slowing an account because of a slowed campaign, maybe it paused it more than once and generated a notice on my summary page this time. Still no email though, unlike the first time.
I waited about 12 hours for a response yesterday, until around 12AM last night. I finally just deleted the keywords, the ads, and then the entire campaign. I finally went and had a drink with a couple friends, who'd been bugging me all night to go out. About 2AM I got back, just exhausted, and checked my status. I had over 1000 impressions, more than twice what I'd had the last two days put together! Unfortunately the Ad Group details hadn't updated yet from when they were zeroed out at midnight, and I had no clicks, so I was still pretty worried.
At 3:15 it finally popped on and showed me that one keyword had generated over 970 of the 1015 impressions I had at the time. It was still "Normal" (I guess they are until your account is slowed, or until just right before), but I deleted it anyways as quickly as I could. I changed the only other phrase match keyword (there were only six keywords in the campaign) to an exact match like the others, and the traffic estimator told me I'd average position 4.9 (I like that more than 4.5, personally) with 3.1 clicks. I thought this was safe enough and passed out about 10 seconds after I closed the lid on my laptop and killed the light.
I woke up at 7 to head to work, and there were no updates yet to my status - this was kind of unusual but I've seen it take more than 5 hours before to update (I didn't get any updates after 9pm tonite until the numbers rolled at midnight and I could select "yesterday" on my keyword filters and reports) so I didn't think too much about it. Well, at 7:30 fresh numbers were in, and I'd only pulled in another 50 impressions or so since I deleted the major offender, giving me like 1075 unless I excluded deleted words, than I had like 137. Imagine my surprise when I hit the Campaign Summary and found I was slowed yet again - for the second time in like 16 hours. I looked, looked, and looked again - only the one keyword I'd deleted was gone, and nothing had this "on hold" status I've heard about - no warning at all, and faster this time than ever.
At this point I decided to just leave it all alone and wait for a reply from Google, which never came. I then decided I was done, and emailed billing at like 9am, again no response. I got some idiotic cut & paste at 5:30pm in response to the very first email I'd sent them, the one telling them I noticed I was slowed out of the blue on thursday without any warning or explanation. They said I should optimize my keywords and adjust my cost per click, so I then decided I'd never use AdWords again. I emailed them back and said:
"Let me re-iterate: no keyword has more than 35 impressions, no keyword has zero impressions, and no keyword has a click. In 16 hours I get 35 impressions, and get bounced because my "CTR is too low". WHICH keywords need to be optimized, and how many clicks should I have for a keyword with 5,10,20,or 35 impressions?"
No answer of course. So, I'm finished with these guys. Speaking of done, I'm done with this story too, because I've quit and come back to it three times. God it pisses me off that Google put their name on this - I don't much care to pay for some service on the Internet unless I'm pretty sure I'm going to get something back, and since it was a Google service I was SURE of it. I couldn't have been more wrong. I'll never use AdWords again, that I assure you - I almost think this is either an intentional thing to throttle advertising to customers who don't spend lots of money to put their keyword spam at the top (thus getting as much out of me in service fees and activation fees as I've paid for clicks this week), or it's so incredibly buggy or poorly planned it's useless. I mean geez, I should just leave it throttled - I've already gotten more impressions since they throttled that than I had before by double - plus I've gotten two clicks.
Why would anyone keep paying $5 all the time to try out new keywords which could lock up their accounts for days, then generate a million impressions on like page 8 or 9 of a search (where I ended up and still am, although it tells me my average position is 3.7), when you could just leave it throttled and know what to expect?
Or am I wrong about that, will they start charging extra fees if I leave it throttled? Well either way my question stands - I want to shut this down before it gets any more out of hand.
Why would anyone keep paying $5 all the time to try out new keywords
I'm pretty sure once you are established that nuisance goes away. I don't know specifics - I would guess a month or maybe a certain amount spent. Personally I received 2 of those emails way back when (2 1/2 years ago), but none since. Give the program a longer try, things should smooth out.
If there was some way to fix keywords without paying $5 every third time you do it, I might think about it. If there was some way to see what keywords caused the problem in the first place, I might think about it. If there were some response from the AdWords as to why all of this is so drastically different than they claim, I might think about it.
Instead I've clocked back all of my campaigns to the mininum CPC and set a daily budget of $5.00 each for them. I hope that Google doesn't figure a way to assess more charges to me, because at this point I don't even want to pay for clicks - I just want to cut my losses and go back to banner advertising, a much more lucrative and targeted prospect.
I've contacted the support email several times, and have always heard back within 24 hours. Perhaps their responses are getting caught in a spam filter?
Seeing almost 1100 impressions in around 3 hours with my other "exact match" keywords averaging 40 but one at 900, I can only imagine one thing happened - although I wouldn't have to guess if I could get a response from them. And by the way, I've checked gmail's spam trap - no messages from the AdWords people in there ;)
After seeing that keyword spike up, I lowered the CPC, since I have a limited budget for this experiment. My logic was "ok, well if it's going to generate that many impressions, let's bid less on it and let it go further back in the line".
Which in fact occurred - when I woke up yesterday morning and I was slowed again, it had only gained another 30 impressions, as had my others (no other keywords seem to be effected by the slowing, impressions seem about the same for the time of day and my average CPC for the campaign is 2.1%).
But I believe the AdWords system detected that I was trying to use a popular keyword without paying the maximum for it, and slowed the account, effect telling me "pay for it or delete it".
Out of principle, I'll do neither.
Statistics are also not updated live. Impressions and clicks can be updated separately so that you may see odd things - you need to let it run for a while before you can believe any of the stats.
If your daily budget isn't high enough, then your advert can be slowed. It tries to pace your adverts so it doesn't display 1500 adverts between 00:00 and 00:02 and none for the rest of the day.
Just wanted to clarify this remark.
If your daily budget isn't high enough, then what will happen is that your ads will be shown intermittently throughout the day. (Reference: [webmasterworld.com...] )
'Slowed' was a keyword status term that is no longer being used by Google. The new keyword status terms can be found here:
[adwords.google.com...]
How to reactivate a slowed AdWords account:
[adwords.google.com...]
How to close AdWords account?
I suppose this is a bit ironic, but as I read this thread, I realize one has answered the original questions - which was how to close an account.
It's very easy. If (or when) you decide you no longer want to advertise with AdWords, just login to your account and delete all of your campaigns. That'll do it.
One nuance to be aware of: AdWords bills you after you have received the clicks, rather than before. So when one deletes all campaigns there will usually be a follow up bill, covering the period from the previous bill to the date that everything was deleted.
With all that said, of course I hope you'll decide to stay. ;)
AWA
I hate to give up, so I figured I'd pony up the money. I still haven't gotten more than 70 impressions each day since Friday, when I "restored delivery" - the same I had for the two days prior to that when I let it remain slowed.
Using the the Ad Diagnostics tool tells me that words containing any of my current keywords that are in "Normal" status with certain other keywords I've used in the past won't show my ad because it's slowed for being below minimum CTR. i.e.:
"widget" (new keyword) returns one of my ads
"blue widget" (blue is not on my KW list) won't show because it's slowed.
This obviously makes it pretty darn difficult to optimize keywords, not knowing which ones are "slowed" and which ones aren't. Although it appears that using specific generic industry keywords before my targeted "phrase match" KWs (I have no broad match keywords) causes my ads not to be shown - which of course defeats the entire purpose of trying to insure relevance. If I sell Large Vanilla Blue Widgets and the only KW people can find me on is "Widgets" (and to delete that KW will generate 0 impressions for my account per day), that's the opposite effect of what you're looking for.
I finally recieved a response to these concerns I voiced on Friday, but it was a generic "check the knowledgebase" thing. The only information in the email targeted towards my situation was that I'd had 247,000 impressions and 216 clicks (which doesn't matter if Google really calculates CTR off of only search engine impressions, which were just over 6000), hence the account slowing. That slowing had occurred last Wednesday morning, which was my first (and only legitimate). I fixed keywords and re-enabled, but my impressions have never been back to where they should be.
The only keywords I've seen "in trial" or "on hold" were in a Paused campaign, so I deleted that one after my second slowing (Thursday night). The next morning (last Friday) I was slowed for a third time - with no KWs showing as a problem.
AWA, it seems from reading some posts around here that you have some pull with the AdWords folks - particularly the tech people. I think (personally) my account's stored on a flaky server in the cluster, or something. But I can't work with AdWords if I don't know what I need to do. I'd ask you to take a look at my account, and why I can't see which KWs are causing problems. If there's no way to know, there's no way to fix it - and if it's generic KWs that flashed out over the content network like wildfire and got secretely blacklisted, I'll have to quit AdWords because I need people to be able to use general keywords in conjuction with my targeted phrases, or this won't work. At least I have to know which ones are down, instead of having them all show up as "normal" and having additional words not in my list cause the ads to not appear.
I've worked hard here to try and figure out the problem, but I'm not getting anywhere. Tech Support tells me to fix the keywords, but not which ones. They quote me stats that aren't supposed to have anything to do with my CTR calculations. And worst of all, no one can tell me why a paused campaign was generating impressions and had on hold/in trial keywords, and why it's legitimate to slow my account for that.
If nothing else, look at today's "Stamps" campaign - I deleted the campaign Friday - it did not generate impressions Saturday or Sunday, but gave out 35 today. Why? I deleted the KWs before they became a problem, but I'm concerned about this, it's the same bugginess I had to pay $5 last week.
Your situation isn't unique. When I started, I had the same problems. I chose keywords that were far too general and had ad copy that wasn't that great. You probably think your keywords are specific and your ad copy is good, but it isn't.
Let me give you an example.
I started a new Ad Group last week. It's very specific--for a single line of widgets (out of thousands of lines on my site). Note that I didn't target "widgets", which is too general. The keywords I used were basically just variations of the name of the line of widgets. The ad copy was titled "Widget Line Discounts". The first few days, my CTR was 0.8% and my average position ranged from 4-9.
I figured I could do better, so I added about half a dozen new ads with different wording. They got CTRs ranging from 0.8% to 3.6%. I deleted the lower performing ads.
I figured I could still do better. I created several more new ads. I added more keywords with specific model names. I used Google's Keyword Suggestion tool and added the appropriate ones. I added negative keywords for the inappropriate ones and for several generic words that typically imply that a searcher is looking for information rather than looking to buy. I also increased the minimum bid now that I was comfortable that the Ad Group was performing better. My CTR and average position improved even further.
I'm now getting a good, steady flow of traffic from this Ad Group. Now I can pick another product line and start another Ad Group.
In A Nutshell: Work on creating incredibly specific keywords. AVOID THE MORE GENERIC ONES. Create lots of ads. Delete the worst performers. Add negative keywords.
However, imagine you've come up with great, specific keywords using all the tools at your disposal - Overture, Google's Keyword Tool, your own creativity, etc. You've created three seperate ad groups - one full of phrase match and exact match keywords that target the specific points where the unique value of your widget line shines (i.e. offering bonuses with purchase, etc).
The second group highlights the technology behind the widgets, with a matching set of phrase & exact match keywords and ads that are designed to attract those more "savvy" customers who already want a widget, but are going to make their purchasing decisions based on the quality and precision of the construction of your widgets.
Finally, you've got a third phrase/exact match group that's designed to reach those customers looking to purchase a different manufacturer's widgets, which are of lower quality and have a higher suggested retail price. Your ads and keywords are geared towards educating potential customers that there is another type of widget out there, and that perhaps it offers better value.
Imagine after all that work, you're just inexplicably not getting impressions - much less clicks. Google's Traffic Estimator tells you your campaign(s) should bring in no less than 50 hits a day, but your getting half that number in impressions.
You search Google using one of your more unique 4 word match phrases which has never had a hit, and one ad comes up - not yours. You add the term "cheap" to the beginning of the phrase, and no ads come up. You use the ad-diagnostics tool with all five words, and you're told that the phrase has been disabled due to low CTR. Your keywords, "laser cut folding widgets" give a response that the ad is shown, but not on the first page. There's one ad for that term on each of the first 10 search result pages, and it's not yours. Once you do a hypothetical search on "cheap laser cut folding widgets", you see your ad is disabled for low CTR. But you've never used the word cheap in your advertising, and the "laser cut folding widgets" term that Google thinks it's serving for you isn't showing up.
How do you optimize around that problem, since you had never used the keyword "cheap" you didn't even know "cheap laser cut folding widgets" wouldn't work until you tried in the ad diagnostics tool. You try 10 or 15 other words that seem like they'd be combined with your phrase match keywords, and find that 2 out 3 claim to be disabled for low CTR, and the other 1 is "shown but not high enough to be on the first page" - however when you actually -do- the Google search, there are no ads at all because it's such a specific keyword.
Then what do you? My response to you is the same as to the Google staff member that finally emailed me back - "how can I further optimize these keywords to eliminate even the 25 impressions I'm still getting, when I don't know which keywords are blacklisted?"
And why would I do such a thing in the first place? I -want- impressions, because impressions create clicks.
MovingOnUp, I think I should clarify that I believe this problem is the exact opposite of not having specific enough keywords. Adding the word "cheap" as a broad match while I have my campaign paused will allow my ad to come up when someone adds that word, but I can't quite afford the cost of carrying that word in broadmatch. Phrase or exact matches for an existing keyword with "cheap" added still all show "Normal", but the Diagnostics tool shows them as all disabled for low CTR.
I don't believe it's a problem -I- can fix.
