Immediately ALL of my Ad Groups stopped Broad Matching, and my average position went down from the 1's to the 3's.
Talk about freaking out.
Trust me I am not a newbe to Adwords. I'm hardly a expert like some of the people on these boards, but I do spend about $30k a month so I think I have a pretty good handle on things.
I called Google, several times, and I can not for the life of me get a straight answer as to what happend and how I can get it fixed. They've told me the change to the URL should have no effect. They refuse to acknowlege what has happend no matter what example I show them.
The only thing I can think of is that whatever equity I had built into my account, I lost, when I made the URL change. Though I cannot find anything in Google's documentation about this earned equity, Ihave read about it on sites like this before.
If anyone has ANY insight this I would really appreciate it. I am about to pull a George Bailey and go into the river.
2 things
1, have your impressions dropped dramatically.
2, are we sure this isnt just the review process of the creative with new url holding things up?
Shak
That process took less than a few hours and I have checked and my Ads are appearing on several partner sites. I use LivePerson.com as my chat software for the site and it shows me where people are comming from and what search term they are using. I can see people comming on and off of the site from AOL, MySearch, ect.
So the ads are definitely serving. It's just that they are not Broad Matching, which is a HUGE problem. It is really wierd.
To be specific, if you type in an exact match on a 2 word keyword that I use - no problem - the ads come up. If you go to any 3 words varient, I do not show but my competitors do.
Example:
Red Shoes: My add shows up and my competitors.
Wrinkly Red Shoes: Only my competitors ads show up.
Because my product is very regionally focused I was able to manually mitigate the problem by concatentating my major keywords with EVERY City name in the U.S. and increase the likelyhood of an exact match.
However this required that I build about 100,000 keywords and that has pissed off Google. Now I am getting a message on my control panel telling me that I need to delete keywords because my Keywords have become unmanagable and is placing unneccesary burden on their Ad Server. That was a first for me!
So I don't no what to do. I plan on calling them again on Monday. I am glad atleast that I have some concrete examples to point to. I was really having a hard time makeing my point to the Google Rep. She just refused to acknowlege that my account had been seriously effected by the change in the URL. She kept on offering abunch of small fixes like - keyword options. Not thatthose were incorrec, it just did not address the real problem.
Just to close this post with a recap, incase anyone else wants to add to this, the bottom line is that I changeed the URL of my website. Then I changed it in Google. the minute I mad that change I lost my ranking across the boards by 2 - 3 positions and my KeyWords no longer broad matched.
It has been 3 days now and still no change.
Any help at all would really be appreciated.
Thanks!
Two things
1.
Have you tried using the "Ad Diagnostic Tool" under the tools menu?
I often find that when google does not serve phrase or broad match terms the Ad Diagnostic Tool states:
"The clickthrough rate (CTR) for this keyword does not meet the minimum performance requirement. "
Google cannot do anything about this... I have tried.
2.
I had a similar problem in the past...I used to get 1000's of impressions a day for one of my broad match keywords... I made some changes and now I am lucky if google serves me 30 impressions per day... the system seems to be evaluating me and it has been this way for weeks now :( Google phone support has no answer.
It also seems that other competitors using broad match are able to use their broad match CTR (which is higher) against my exact match.....resulting in me taking a lower position...
comments?
Yes it spit back a bunch of suggestions, but none of them make any sense to me.
I ran a few tests and I was basically able to disprove everything the tool was telling me.
As you can tell I am pretty frustrated at this point. Not much I can do though. I am beggining to hate Google. God help them if somebody else figures out a better system. I'll take my half million bucks and be gone.
Well, I am going to continue to terrorize Google Support. They are nice people but in my opinion they seem to know only about as much as most of the serious users of thier system. That's too bad.
If anyone has any other experiences like this I would really appreciate hearing about them.
I will close with this...
WORD TO THE WISE! DO NOT EVER CHANGE THE URL ON YOUR AD GROUPS! YOU WILL REGRET IT AND GOOGLE WILL LEAVE YOU HANGING IN THE WIND!
I like your idea of loading up keywords. Most of mine are either "on hold" and some are even disabled. I tend to think they're not much smarter than the rest of us, and they are learning as we are.
Oh yes. I have been trying their BETA site for keyword matches, [google.com...] Has anyone else had a chance to look at this site? I've been stuffing my keywords from this site.
Thanks... nice little tool.
Now I am getting a message on my control panel telling me that I need to delete keywords because my Keywords have become unmanagable and is placing unneccesary burden on their Ad Server. That was a first for me!
Has anyone ever seen this message before? I just looked at several accounts, all of which have in excess of 100k keywords, and didn't see this message anywhere.
I'm wondering what G is upto with this warning message and if there's something else in your account which is causing the problem.
"The keywords in your account are nearing an unmanageable size. Please consider refining your keyword lists and/or reducing the number of keywords within your account. This will ensure that your account includes the most targeted and relevant keywords possible. Click here to learn more about managing your keyword list. "
It is now stopping me from adding any more Keywords, and effectively stopping me from creating new ad groups, campaigns, ect.
PS: the Google Suggest site is awesome. Thanks to the person who suggested it in the thread above!
It just makes no sense that a simple "destination url" change screws everything up...
What usually happens is the advertiser becomes desperate and trys all sorts of techniques in order to get their campaign running the way it used to.
The end result might be a lot of money wasted.
I told G that changing a destination url changes the behaviour of my campaign and they argue that it has no effect... :(
I wish google provided some solid technical insight about how their backend system works...
I am getting tired of doing experiment after experiment to figure out how things work. Each experiment costing me money with the results going back to google support.
I think adwords is Genius and the people that make up the support and editorial team are very nice...
but google seems to be taking in a nice profit by not explaining how the system really works..
-my keyword gets disabled I spend loads of money.
-my destination url changes and I am not able to get the results I was used to I spend more money.
I cannot wait until a documentation is released on how the backend really works,
btw.. my biggest problem right now with G is that they seem to be using advertisers broad match CTR for certain keywords to determine ad position against advertisers whos CTR derives from an exact match....
this is unfair especially when high traffic broad match keywords do not even get a chance anymore....
sometimes I feel like just getting my account wiped out and starting over.. history history history,
Regards,
history history history,
It's like a lifetime sentence. Didn't realise this post was here, until kindly pointed out by eWhisper.
[webmasterworld.com...]
Same keyword overload message at a low level after opening a new account for a client.
