One account tanked around Sept 1st? No changes have been made

[DiscoStu]

One of the accounts I monitor but rarely make changes to is all of a sudden getting 1-2 conversions a day, from doing about 25 a day for a long time. Checked change history, and the drop was around Sept 1st - but no changes were made anywhere close to that date. Anyone else notice something around Sept 1st? I really have no clue what could have caused it, been using Ads Diagnostic tool but not finding anything that explains it

[buckworks]

Conversions are down ... what about impressions and clicks? Are they stable or have they changed too?

if you've made no changes, look for something in the broader situation that might be affecting your campaigns.

Maybe a new competitor has come on the scene, or an old competitor has become more aggressive, or perhaps something on the news or the entertainment scene has created a surge of searches that are triggering your ads to no good effect.

You can often solve performance problems of the latter type by digging in the query reports. I once had a campaign start behaving strangely and the cause turned out to be that the name of a newly released video game had some vocabulary overlap with one of my search terms. Of course the off-target impressions were bad news! Once I added the name and some fragments as negative keywords, performance returned to normal.

[DiscoStu]

Impressions, clicks & conversions are all down. It's as if the ads are just not showing like they did. A new competitor arriving should not cause such a drastic and account wide drop. Normally I would assume something was up with the site (form not working properly etc) but since clicks and impressions are done too so that doesn';t explain it either...

[trinorthlighting]

Take a look in the google section of webmasterworld about google switching to the live Ajax keyword suggestion. I bet the keywords you might have targeted might not be getting suggested to users when they do a query on google. We have been looking into that issue ourselves in organic search.

Example, we target a keyword of rope light and google suggests the plural form of rope lights with an s on the end. When Ajax went live, we saw a change as well in searches which was right around the same time period.

[netmeg]

The very first thing I'd do is run some test orders in IE, FF and Chrome to make sure there's nothing wrong with your landing page or your cart. Just because you haven't changed something doesn't mean they haven't been touched.

Then I'd narrow it down to what's tanked - Search or Content?

If search - go back in history, find out what WAS converting as to keywords and ads, and see if you still hold same positions. Check quality scores.

If content - go back in history (via placement reports) and see which sites were sending converting traffic, and see if you're still advertising on those sites.

[RhinoFish]

do netmeg's steps

keep in mind that the change history log doesn't record every type of change (which they should fix).

look through your search funnels to see if something's changed there - like someone touching the customer after you, but before they buy.

don't forget to look back at last year in case you have something seasonal in play.

if you're on Conversion Optimizer, there's a whole set of other things to look at - but they all start with netmeg's steps, knock those out first. should lead you to where to look more closely.

[DiscoStu]

Thanks for the advice. The campaign was running on CPA bidding (unchanged for a long time) so I wondered if it somehow got "stuck" on low bids and I changed it to manual bidding. Things seem back to normal now, or at least I'm getting clicks/conversions again.

But it makes me wonder if certain adgroups receiving 0 clicks in a campaign running CPA bidding may just be stuck, i.e. the data they are basing the automated bidding on suggests a too low bid to even get it started. Going to do some experiments with this...