Check this out for the month to date for the same KW.
Me
max bid $0.61
CTR 2.5%
CPC $0.68
Avg position 6.1
Him
max bid $0.65
CTR 1.5%
CPC $0.39
AVG position 6.0
My CTR is 70% higher than his so I should be paying a *lower* amount than he does. But I am paying over 70% *more* than him and am 1 slot lower on the results!
There are dozens of examples of this over the past few months and it's frustrating. The only difference I can think of is that his campaign has been running for a couple of years and mine only for about 2 months.
I know that there is supposed to be some sort of account average CTR but could it really be this dramitic?
Any thoughts are appreciated. Thanks.
it does look a bit odd.
It may have something to do with his historical CTR over the longer period he has been running the campaign. If he has had a much higher CTR in the past then google may be taking this into consideration.
Only speculation chap, so maybe someone else could back me up or give another possible reason for it.
Briggidere
Also, with the new Quality Score, it could be that this is affecting your ads. However, this is less likely the case since you probably have been comparing these numbers before yesterday even though Google has been slowly implementing their ranking changes for some time now.
There are also other factors to deal with including competitors, position throughout the day, etc.
Both targeting same locations.
The new AW system has not yet him either of these accounts and these issues have been going on since I started my campaign in late June.
Both campaigns are set to google + search networks (no content.)
Everything is the same on both accounts except for the age of the accounts. I just can't imagine that this would have such a large effect. I keep thinking that I must be missing some key point here but I've been over everything dozens of times and can't see what might be.
With a budget twice his, your budget probably carries you well into the evening hours, while his may only take him to early evening before it caps out, and his ads may only be displayed half as many times as yours throughout the day. This means that you will be competing with each other some of the time, and other bidders at other times. While G does try to spread ads out during the day based on the campaign daily budget, it doesn't seem to be very good at making sure ads run evenly over a 24 hour period. Obviously they want to get your full daily budget amount, so for campaigns with relatively low budget limits, the ads may only run for part of a day. This absolutely will cause the kind of results you show.
It is a really hassle to do it, but I have been pausing my campaigns at 11 pm, and not restarting them until about 4 pm the next day. Because of the services I market, as well as the demographics of my customers, my prospects are generally not online during the day, but get really active after working hours. So now my ads run for 6-8 hours instead of 24, in the best time slot for my offerings and still get the same number of total impressions they used to when they ran 24/7. Because many of my competitors run out their daily budgets by 6-8 pm and my budget is just getting started at that time, my ads run 3 times more often during that prime time slot, at better average positions and CPC rates than they ever did before, and cost/conversion is also down by 35%. Depending on the product/service, this may not work for everyone.
