*My ad has CTR of 4.7%
*I have a daily budget of $5000
*Keyword has one main competitor. (different display url)
*I am the only person bidding on the domain name.
*Keyword says "active"
*Keyword is in broad status.
*Keyword is also in exact status.
Yet, when perform a test query, the ad only shows about 40-50% of the time. Googles Ad Diagnostic tool says "The clickthrough rate (CTR) for this keyword does not meet the minimum performance requirement.".
Well what the ****, my CTR is 4.7%, there is only 1 other person bidding on this keyword. This is happening to over 500 of my good keywords. I called Google about two weeks ago, and all they could tell me was "the system puts many variable's into their adwords algo, the only thing I could think of is it might be something with you landing page."
And as far as the content, my landing pages go right to search form. This particular ad is related to "Searching Widgets"(widgets as example). My ad says things on the line of:
Search All Widgets
Access widgets, green widgets,
yellow widgets, and more
My landing page is the "search form" (just what they are looking for). My conversion rate is high, so that proves the users ARE infact finding what they are looking for. Our product is a $35.00 product, and our conversion rate ranges from 2-3% (sometimes more) consistantly. (1 out of 30-50 buy) for this keyword.
As far as adsense, there are a few pages that have adsense at the VERY bottom of the page. The landing pages are not meant for adsense revenue. We try to keep the ads out of the way. They actually were just added about 2 weeks ago.
Also, why would the ad diagnostic tool report a "CTR" problem - when it actually is not a "CTR" problem.
I had a couple of discussions with Google reps about this. As a programmer, I think I can understand what is going on.
My guess is somebody just threw this at a programmer with insufficient specification. They were given a list of "reasons" to classify each case of non-display into, and some (or many) of the actual reasons didn't fit into the cases they were given. They had to put them SOMEWHERE, so it was the programmer's best guess.
They may be using return codes from fuctions that give insufficient specificity as to the cause of non-display. The diagnostic tool may not have been something that was thought-of from the beginning. So, you may have Fuction X that makes a decision on some set of parameters to decide display or non-display, and it just returns a FALSE, rather than a specific code indicating WHY it should not display. Then there might be Function Y that does some more checking on other aspects.
So, then along comes Marty Manager and tells the programmer they need something to tell users why their ads don't display. But it really isn't possible to do that without rewriting everything. Well, maybe mostly, Function X is about adult content. But it also catches a few cases of misspelling of non-naughty words. If you're the programmer, what do you do? If Marty doesn't like to hear about these messy details, and certainly doesn't want to hear about schedule delays, you just classify it as adult content.
My speculation ENTIRELY. But it has the feel of something like this. I'd guess that the original design didn't anticipate reporting on reason for non-display.
Obviously, I will do whatever it takes to get my ad displayed.
I just wish that I knew what the problem was!
If it's any consolation, I get the same message despite similar keyword and AdGroup CTRs. Almost as though the long coveted almighty keyword CTR is a small factor in the algo now.
It's kind of random too. Other sites with almost identical setups and often lower CTRs have all keywords showing all the time.
You just have to try different approaches until you find what pleases the Google God now. Just like with SEO.
Israel
For example, another one that don't show any more (it used to show via broad match).
Example using numbers...
The keyword was 001001 (example)
"001001" used to show
"001001 999" used to show
-----------------------------------------
"001001" shows still (most of the time)
"001001 999" does not show at all any more.
Ad diagnostic tool says its because of CTR also.
