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jabbas_dad
Joined: Jul 05, 2004
# Posts: 1
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Posted: 2004-Jul-05 19:21
ok here goes.
we have several sites, use google adwords, overture, espotting etc etc
not to say we are pro's but we have been running campaigns for several years
indeed we opened our google adwords account the week after the service was born, ditto for overture.
We see around 14,000-17,000 clicks in a month from overture and also from google using U.S. and UK targetting
Not to go into major detail about the campaign structures... but the key thing is that the campaigns/keywords have been duplicated to each of the search engines. Perfomance has been both reliable and adequate with little active intervention. Why mess up a good thing!
Incredibly google adwords and overture give us almost exactly the same results.
from 17,000 click thrus we would see around 240-300 sales. (thats 1.4 - 1.8%) about average. (as an aside almost all other ppcs in my opinion are just black holes providing exceptionally poor results)
Anyway for google 240-300 sales on 17,000 clicks has occured month-in, month-out for the last 3 yrs or so.....
Here is the problem:
In June the Adwords performance has completely slumped. (yes we have slow months but June 2004 has seen an unprecidented plummet)
what we have seen is our traffic decrease by around 30% to around 11,000 click thrus, but on this we got just 22 sales (compared to the 160 or so we might otherwise expect on even this reduced traffic).
Our campaigns, placements, bids etc have not been altered or changed in anyway.
And no, our websites have not changed in anyway.... indeed our overture traffic remains fairly static and our conversion rate with overture during june 2004 was 262 sales on 15,400 clicks.
The only thing we noticed was the recent email about adwords "improved ad relevancy" all touted as a good thing but asking us to keep an eye on our conversion stats!!
A close eye was not needed it would seem!
So has anyone else noticed this serious slump??
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flyingrose
Staff
Joined: Oct 30, 2003
# Posts: 3361
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Posted: 2004-Jul-05 21:26
I have many advertisers whose traffic and conversions from Google ads have declined substantially, particularly in June. Some seem to have been affected starting April 1st just after the first "improved ad relevancy" letters went out. This is the reason I posted a heads up here when another round of that letter went out July 1st.
One small advertiser's traffic dropped 60% from June 1-23 even though nothing has been changed on their account this year. Some of their keywords have a new competitor but not nearly enough to account for this dramatic drop.
Their impressions and clicks suddenly went back to "normal" about June 23rd. Although summer traffic on the Internet can be lower, this is their busy season and they did not see this drop last summer.
One large account saw traffic and sales drop in April and stay low until I was contracted to optimize their campaigns. I have been able to triple their traffic and lower their costs and sales are rising.
Although most of that increase is due to my services, some may be from the recovery I saw with the smaller advertisers' accounts increasing traffic the end of July.
There are a vast number of variables involved in how changes, technical issues, and Internet problems affect each advertiser. One thing for sure is that things will continue to keep changing rapidly.
Because the effect of these changes are and will always be outside your immediate control, I strongly recommend that advertisers take whatever actions are necessary to ensure that they have multiple streams of traffic and income.
Awareness of Keyword aka PPC Advertising is still low. There is room for enormous growth in competition. It is far easier to get a strong CTR track record at Google on less competitive terms.
Those who optimize and get position now have an advantage over their competition. As the old saying goes, I believe it behooves advertisers to "Make hay while the sun shines". Costs are unlikely to go down and highly likely to increase over time.
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flyingrose
Staff
Joined: Oct 30, 2003
# Posts: 3361
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Posted: 2004-Jul-22 06:20
After further evaluation I believe traffic is dropping for many advertisers due to far heavier competition - in some cases bidders and bids have doubled since a year ago.
At least part of this change is due to Google broad matching terms which previously had few bidders and low bids. The balance is due to the growth in number of advertisers.
When I originally created accounts for clients at both Google and Overture, the bids at Overture were almost always much higher on most keywords. That is no longer true for many clients who are not in extremely competitive markets.
Some clients can now get higher positions for far less at Overture than they have to pay at Google, primarily because there are fewer advertisers in their markets there.
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Parrothead
Joined: Apr 25, 2000
# Posts: 85
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Posted: 2004-Jul-26 15:53
A little late to respond to this, but we too have noticed this same trend starting around June.
For one of my e-commerce clients their ROI took a major nosedive and was basically sliced in half. I've made some adjustments since then and it seems to be inching back upward, but it's still not close to where it was before. This is a client whose peak activity comes during the summer too which makes it all the more perplexing. Increased competition can account for a portion of the decrease, but not such a suddenly pronounced change. This is a fairly advanced segment and most of the top competition has already been in this market for a couple years now (if anything we've done a pretty good job of indirectly working together to keep prices reasonable.)
One thing I've been testing off and on is to disable content matching/AdSense for various lengths of time. While that seems to put a significant dent in traffic, the bottom-line sales don't appear to be affected much. I'm loathe to disable content matching completely given the traffic it generates, but if the ROI continues to suffer we might just do so. I don't think that's the best long term answer though so I'll continue to try and revise things as I think the 'problem' still lies elsewhere.
Meanwhile, the Overture campaign for this client continues to blossom with sales outpacing AdWords and a much stronger overall ROI. We've always had great success with both services, but Overture is looking especially strong right now. The more direct control there is both a strength and weakness. Right now it's most definitely a strength.
[ Message was edited by: Parrothead 07/26/2004 08:09 am ]
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pyparks
Joined: Apr 26, 2000
# Posts: 116
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Posted: 2004-Jul-26 16:29
Same experience here. We have quite a few accounts and it's the same accross the board even for uncompetitive sites. I talked with a rep at Google and their take is due to the "summer season". This big of a slump didn't happen last year for us. All of the accounts are also set to max spend and wide open.
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flyingrose
Staff
Joined: Oct 30, 2003
# Posts: 3361
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Posted: 2004-Jul-26 19:43
I am fairly confident that it is NOT the "summer season" because clients whose busy season IS summer are also being affected. I see numerous causes so far:
1) Increased competition has lowered positions on some campaigns, necessitating an increase in bids
2) The drops occurred after the "New Broad Matching" feature was announced and this is definitely affecting many advertisers. (Terms you may have previously had little competition on are now "matched" to the most competitive terms causing a drop in traffic.) You'll want to either add more terms or raise bids to recover this traffic.
3) Technical problems in Google's system are seriously impacting SOME advertisers by causing their ads to stop displaying periodically - sometimes for hours or days at a time. (Test for this by checking to see if YOUR ads are running - especially those that seem to have substantially less impressions than normal.)
4) Your ads may have been dropped from many broad matched phrases due to the way Google is implementing broad match now. Instead of 1,000 impressions to test each phrase, if your ad is displayed some low number of times and is not clicked on, it is judged to be less relevant and will no longer be displayed. If you have a lot of broad matched terms you may see a major drop in impressions. You can improve this by adding all the exact and phrase matches you can find.
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