Adwords Campaign Costing Twice As Much, Anyone else with this problem?

Hi

We have been using Google Adwords for a while. The costs/clicks are now quite stable on a daily basis.

Last Wednesday, the daily cost doubled. The number of clicks nearly doubled, our CTR was up 50% and our CPC was also higher.

However, the conversions were not higher. We did not have any more sales than usual or calls.

The initial reason from Google was that this was a technical error and ads in some ad groups had not been authorised even though they had been in there for months. They are now saying that the industry as a whole had more traffic. I have checked with companies and they have not seen the same spike.

Some ad groups were costing over 1000% more than the day before.

Is there anything else I can check? Surely it's not right.

I've not checked our log files yet. Can anyone recommend anything to check logs with. I always have problems with our logs, they are over 1gb a day. Does this sound too big? I don't know where to start at analysing my logs.

Any ideas would be great.

Thanks
Peor

First off you should have daily caps on them to begin with.

Other than that it is most likely Googles new Adwords algorithm is scoring your landing page relevancy and content low. You probably have your position selection set high with high daily limits, or your using content search, (or both) and you were Google stung.

Don't worry, everyone IS eventually. To what extent is the only difference.

But not to fret, they may credit you up to $50, but doubtful.

If you have your landing pages all going to one main page, this is where you are getting penalized. If not, then spend thee time to increase the keyword density (the keyword/keyword phrase) on each landing page.

I run one campaign that has 60k kw/kw phrases and used a database and concatenated an excel file with my adwords with my page keywords to build my campaigns. Then bulk uploaded them. I also use Hit Tail, but not until I had establish good CTR and conversion.

Spend the time to work on your landing pages. It's the same idea as if you were doing basic SEO.

GaryTheScubaGuy

A few weeks back my Adwords costs went through the roof. I was able to cut them in half by using the Google Adwords scheduling. I found that non-North American entiities were clcking the ads during the night... less than .1% coversions stink. Once I adjusted the ad schedule to shut the ads down during my night time, my costs went down while my CTR and conversions improved. It might be worth a shot to adjust your schedules to suit your geographic reach.

I could never get scheduling to work properly SEO_AM. It was always delayed by a couple hours it seemed. And when I tried to adjust it it still didn't work properly. I'm in the US running a UK campaign, and I had 30k changed scheduled, so I'm not sure if that may have had something to do with it but I never had success with it.

I did start eliminating thousands of non-performing kw's and ads and am slowly seeing a lower CPClick and CPConversion, and definitely see higher positioning with a much lower cost.

I agree, by making changes to the geo-targeting and ad scheduling you should see improvements to your accounts performance. I'd suggest monitoring the accounts closely so that you can review all aspects of the accounts performance and keep tweaking the areas which are not cost-effective.

The biggest problem I have seen with coroporate accounts I have taken over the reins for is that they have a guy going in there and once a day adjusting bids and other settings.

A successful adwords campaign is a full time job if its responsible for driving enough of your traffic.

Learn statistical analysis, use 110% of your analytics that google offers, and run constant reports, AND LOOK AT THEM!

Use the adwords editor, (I have found this expedites your changes a little quicker), and spend a few weeks on your campaigns, and eventually they will run themselves (well, about 80% of the time) without constant tweaking.

Also, email Google about installing a "wayback" feature in Adwords so you can revert back to previous campaign settings...god knows I have enough.

GaryTheScubaDiver

Hi All

Thanks for all your replies. Sorry for the delayed response. Had a few days off.

I've had a reply from Google. They cannot see anything wrong with the clicks that came through. What a surprise! But what am I suppose to do now? That one day alone costed us a lot and it went on for a few days after. How can there not be any strange activity. Everything doubled. None of our competitors experienced the same!

Any ideas on what our response to Google should be? Should we be checking anything?

In answer to the above I do spend time over the campaign but to be honest the anayltics on my side could be much better. I've tried using the Google Anayltics but things like conversions don't seem to much what I am seeing in sales.

I will go through what you have said though and see how I get on.

Could anyone give me an idea on good CTR. I know it depends on the term etc but just wondering if there is an average?

Thanks

If you get 3%-7% your doing good

We were averaging about 10% before our sudden surge.