Views jump to 20k and then back down

[moltar]

Does anyone have any idea what this can be?

One of my clients has views jumping to 20,000 in one day (he normally might get a 100 max) . But then a few hours later they scale back down to a normal level.

My only guess/assumption is that Google filtering out fraud views/bots?

Thanks.

[RhinoFish]

This could be many things. Are you bidding CPC, CPM, CPV? DayParting settings? Does it happen at a certain time of the day? Accelerated or Standard spend pacing set? Using any automated bidding, like Enhanced CPC, CPA, ROAS? Using external data that imports into audiences or reports conversions in batches? Does the bid predictor show a steep curve for incremental traffic increases? Using any shared budgets that are maxing out, forcing this Campaign to run low on funds and be throttled back. Are you running Search, Display, or mixed? Tell us more, maybe we can suggest good places to look.

[moltar]

Bidding: Manual CPC
Ad scheduling: All days | 09:00 AM - 08:00 PM
It happens usually towards the end of the day.
Ad rotation: Optimize for clicks: Show ads expected to provide more clicks
Budget is not shared.
Search network only.

The key to understand is that impressions go down the same day. I want to clear that up. It's not like one day there are 20,000 impressions and the next is 150. It's literally within the same day. The impressions would be slowly climbing up, then all of a sudden they go to 20,000 and then somehow, magically go back down. How can impressions count bacwards?

[RhinoFish]

Spend set to Standard or Accelerated?

I understand the "goes back down" part now...
Imps should not decrease, unless AdWords is wiping out fraudulent data, and that amount of relative fraud, would be very abnormal.

When you look at a single day, and segment by hour of the day, can you see hours with tons of imps?
When you do this for the current day, and you look several times during the suspected end of day time span, do imps for any certain hour drop?

What time zone is your AdWords account set to? What time zone are you actually located in?

[moltar]

Standard.

The wiping of fraud is the only thing I can think of. And this only happens on 1 out of 4 campaigns. That one campaign has a national targeting and the other 3 have more specific locale targeting. National excludes those locales.

I agree that it is very abnormal. I have never seen this myself before. Although I am not an AdWords guru.

The distribution of views/clicks by hour seems fine. There are no jumps, but then again they were rolled back, so I don't expect to see it. I need to catch it in the moment. It doesn't happen every day.

The time zone I was also suspecting that it maybe was in a different one, and the views were rolling over, but it is not the case. The time zone is EST for both account and the computer. Besides, even if from the day before, it wouldn't be 20k. He never ever gets this many imps. Just for comparison, he got 8k imps in the last 30 days.

[tangor]

How many days has this behavior occurred? If it is not every day then it's an outlier, likely a network fault on the provider's end. On the other hand, if it is relatively consistent it might be something else (obscuring something more pertinent).

[moltar]

It is happening for a while now, but not every day and not the same size of a jump each time. I am not seeing any specific patterns yet.

[RhinoFish]

When you go to Billing & Payments, then Transactions, you might see an occasional refund for invalid charges.
Even on large accounts, for my agency, it's not common for these credits to exceed $10, many are under $1.
The timing there isn't nailed down tightly, but you might review things there, to see what's up.

On Search Partners, it might also be possible that errata is being reported, then corrected a few hours later.
I have not seen this ever happen, I'm just saying I'd look for it by segmenting.

If it continues, open a trouble ticket with AdWords, their engineers there are busy folks, but it's been my experience that they will investigate and reply via support.

Hope you figure it out and let us know.
Good luck!