Erratic ad placement in AdWords

Anyone notice that the order of ad appearance is more erratic now than in the past? I can't believe what's happening to mine. With every click of the search button for a given keyword my ad moves from #1, to near last, to not even displayed. These are high cost keywords and I have always bid to be consistently at or near the top. Never saw anything like this before.

It has been like that for a long time and that behavior will continue to worsen until Google addresses the primary causes. The main reason is the non-functional Recommended Daily Budget function.

Each time someone searches is a new "auction" for keyword placement. The more advertisers whose budgets are inadequate the more erratic the number of advertisers participating in each auction will be.

If every advertiser had an adequate budget, the position your ad appears in on each search will vary depending upon each advertiser's recent CTR and bid. If these change little from search to search, positions are fairly stable.

When advertisers have inadequate budgets as is occurring more and more because Google's system isn't correctly indicating how much an adequate budget would be, their ad impressions are limited based on the budget. I'll try to clearly and simply explain why this puts your ads all over the map:

Advertiser #1 has enough budget to appear every time.
Advertiser #2 only has half that amount so their ads appear every other search
Advertiser #3 has a budget 1/4 that amount. Their ads appear every fourth search
Advertiser #4 has a budget 1/5 that much. Their ads appear every fifth search
Advertiser #5 has a budget 1/10 of that required. Their ads appear only one in every tenth search

Remember that each of these advertisers has a different bid set and a different CTR, so the impact of their ad appearing or not appearing affects you only if their ad is above yours.

If half of the ads that could appear above you only show up every second, third, fourth, fifth, tenth, twentieth time in a random order there is no way to stabilize your bids. The higher the bids of the ads that are coming and going, the more often your ad gets bumped down.

I have recently been seeing some keywords that are getting far fewer than normal impressions. They place the advertisers' ad either first or not on the first page at all. That is very difficult to manage or explain.

Since Google's Recommended Daily Budget function will most often say your budget is adequate - EVEN WHEN IT IS NOT - advertisers are well advised to check manually to ensure your budgets are sufficient to keep your ads running consistently.

I have seen Google's Recommended Daily Budget function say a campaign's budget is fine even when:

* A campaign has spent 100% of that amount for numerous consecutive days.

* At the same time there is a message in the account telling the advertiser their ads are missing xx% of the available traffic and advising that the budget be raised to $xx.xx.

* Even when the Ad Diagnostic Tool indicates that a keyword is not triggering ads because of an inadequate budget.

I have called Google and SHOWN THEM each of these issues AT THE TIME THEY WERE APPEARING. I have also sent them messages from within accounts being affected. I have done this repeatedly in multiple accounts but the issue has still not been resolved.

I recommend that all advertisers MANUALLY check the budgets in each of their campaigns. Here are the steps I use to make sure budgets are not limiting impressions:

First, at the campaign level set the Budget Option, Delivery Method to Accelerated. This causes your ads to display consistently as long as there is room left in your budget. Then you can use the Ad Diagnostic Tool magnifying glass icon late in the evening (ideally just before your ads roll over to the next day) to check for the message indicating your ads are not being displayed due to budget.

Next, check your spend amount on numerous individual days. If you're spending your budget or very close to it I highly recommend you raise it.

Two additional points:

1. For maximum results it is imperative that your ads show up consistently. If you do not wish to spend the amount necessary for your existing ads to display for EVERY SEARCH you will be better off pausing some ads or keywords than running all of them erratically.

2. Most people do not totally understand how Google's system works. It decides how relevant your ads are based on your CTR. Searching on your own keyword phrases and not clicking on your ads can increase your CPC or even disable that keyword phrase. It is best NOT to search for your own ads using www.google.com or any partner site.

Now the bad news: For many advertisers, even if you fix YOUR budget you will be unable to stabilize your ad positions and advertising costs as long as the other advertisers bidding on your keywords don't fix theirs. The higher the competition and bids and the greater the number of ads affected for each search the worse the impact of this issue.

If you have the Account Snapshot feature in your account you may be able to see the effect these issues have on your campaigns. Before the issue started most advertisers graphs had rounded edges. Now more and more they have sharp spikes up and down.

You may be able to see these same effects in your analytics programs or by creating spreadsheet graphs for various periods of time and comparing historical data with more recent timeframes.

[ Message was edited by: flyingrose 06/15/2007 12:29 am ]

Rose, You are a resource. I'm not surprised that you had the answers if not the solutions. I am surprised that this has been going on for a long time. I monitor my campaigns very closely and haven't seen this until the last week or so. Mine is a thinly traveled market, but very competitive. I think I'll raise this issue with Google. Perhaps if enough advertisers complain we can bring them around.

Thanks for your detailed and informative response.

I would be thrilled if more advertisers would notify Google when they see issues such as this appear in their own accounts. It usually takes many notifications before challenges get addressed.

Because of the huge variance in competitiveness compounded by how Google's system works the issues start affecting advertisers at different times. The longer and more thoroughly a product/service has been advertised the tougher it gets.

P.S. Those who want to better understand why Google's system does what it does read up on neural nets. Searching on the phrase "neural nets tutorial" will bring up numerous resources on the subject.

Interesting...over the last two days the variability I talked about in my first post on this thread has completely ceased. My ads are back to their usual consistent position. I don't know if this is limited to just my market area or true in a broader sense. Has anyone else seen their ads stabilize?