Sudden Increase in Impressions and CTR

Why?

[ember]

We are in a very specific, seasonal niche. The high season is March through about November. This is the dead season. For the last three years, and again yesterday, impressions suddenly tripled and CTR doubled. Just out of the blue. Not the display network but the search network. No changes whatsoever on our part. Not to the ad or the price per click or anything else. The last two years this lasted about three months and then calmed down. This year I was on the lookout for it to happen and sure enough, yesterday it did.

Any ideas why this happens? If it were the display network, I could understand it a bit more. I am not complaining. Just curious.

[buckworks]

Is it happening on a specific keyword, or throughout your account? There might be some clues in your query reports.

One thought that comes to mind is that perhaps your product or something related to it was mentioned in the offline media someplace, which made people curious.

Example: someone in these forums once posted that they saw a spike in search activity which was triggered by one of the clues in a major newspaper's crossword puzzle! (Sorry I can't remember who said that, to give proper credit.)

[ember]

We only advertise one thing, so only have one campaign, but it is happening to all keywords. It could be something happening offline somewhere, but it is just so odd that this is the third year in a row it has happened on almost exactly the same day of the same month during what should be our down season.

[Spyglass]

Hi Ember, have you looked at your traffic by network? Quite often I see big surges in impressions from the Search Network, which I can only assume is down to Google adding new search partners, or existing search partners adding to the pages ads show on (remember the search network includes both ebay and amazon, where ad's are triggered not just by keyword searches but also by clicks on product sub-categories).

[netmeg]

Lots of things can contribute to weird little spikes. Look at Google trends? Look WHERE your traffic is? Sometimes my US holiday site gets spikes from similar type holidays in other countries. Did your traffic convert (if you are ecommerce)? Look at the search queries to see what users are actually typed in (as opposed to the broad matched keywords in your account)

[ember]

Thanks for the insights. It is still a mystery. Search queries are the same, just more of them. Still from the same places. Just more people are clicking. I have no idea why and I guess I will just have to live with the mystery.