Below is a graph showing Google AdWords traffic to a clients site recently. Notice how the traffic dropped to a tenth of its normal value for about 10 days and then rose up to twice it’s normal value?
During the entire course of these traffic fluctuations not one change was made to the campaign. It’s all due to Google fiddling around with quality scores.
How is the average person supposed to understand why their sales have dropped?
Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Leeds based digital & SEO agency Branded3. Patrick also runs Blogstorm.You can get our blog posts delivered for free by email every day - simply add your email address to the box below or alternatively grab the RSS feed.
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{ 11 comments… read them below or add one }
I’ve had some weird experiences with Analytics. For some reason, some of the sites I monitor show huge spikes that are displayed as direct traffic for a period of a couple of days when I know for a fact that there is no marketing activity that would cause this. I’ve never worked out why.
yeh thats a huge problem i have also, the quality score debate im sure will rage on, it does have benefits, ie to get rid of “landing pages” and redirects but like you say Patrick its frustrating when you dont touch the bids or ads and they still cgah gem very hard to keep a track of budgets
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Dave in this case Analytics was spot on, AdWords was at fault.
If you get a spike in traffic be sure to check the hostname for that traffic, you might find that somebody has scraped your page and included your Analytics tag on their page. Happens to me all the time.
More comments from Patrick AltoftCould it also be a competitor bidding above you on a keyword and pushing you out of the top 3 until they’re out of budget?
Good point Patrick – must pay more attention! I just saw the line and letter A – brain did the rest.
That is pretty amazing that adwords traffic could change so much though, pretty concerning if you’re spending alot of money, especially if you’re answering to a client.
Google must be doing something right, they’ve got a monopoly on search, everyone has to follow what they do, and everyone still loves them – amazing really!
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Matt the keywords are fairly diverse and long tail so I don’t think a competitor could be bidding on them all.
More comments from Patrick AltoftHi Patrick, we did a structure change on a campaign around 18/Sep and for a few days (~4) we had our ad groups on 0 (zero) impressions, clicks, ctr, etc. Now the campaign is back to normality and has increased a little bit it performance, but it was almost in the same period of time you are talking about. Its “nice” to see we aren’t the only ones pulling out our hair ’cause Adwords…
In my opinion, I am believe in Organic search result more than Adwords. I keep writing a honest post about Stock Market Education. Although it start only one month, I did receive some traffic for people who really interested on my post
I also think that “oganic” is better than ppc. I put together an adwords campaign for my wifes company. After I got it up, going, and tweeked it worked great. Then, for apparently no reason I could find, the whole campaign seemed to fall apart. I stopped wasting my time trying to figure the whole thing out. Not interested in Adwords anymore.
Saw similar with few of our client’s AdWords account as well, but seems to be back normal. I also noticied similar statistics with Froogle / Google Product Search.. anyone else noticed with product the feeds?
Vinay: no, just at only one adwords account.
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