2 or 3 times in the last 6 months we have had bursts (1-6 days) of activity on particular keywords. Impressions and clicks through have increased by up to 100 times but with zero conversions. Recently one Adword (normally costing us 10p per day) went up to over £9.50 per day for about 6 days! During those 6 days we had 188685 impressions (more than the 160277 of the previous 2 years put together!) Google maintains that this is normal traffic and can find no anomaly. I know that this traffic is abnormal but can't prove it. Any ideas?
Look through your server logs for the ips of the suspect traffic. Check whether they are coming from the same ips, also check whether the ips are coming from proxies. Also have a look at the referrer information and see if there is anything odd there. If most of the traffic is coming from the same ip then this is suspect, and also if the traffic is coming from proxies this also sound suspect.
First thing I would do is pause the campaign, check logs for suspect traffic and contact google. If you can actually prove the traffic is fraudulent then you'll get the help you need from google. However, as I have experienced, they are less than helpful if you can't prove anything. They just told me it was probably a spike caused some news event =/ However, luckily for me. After resuming my campaign again, the spam seemed to have stopped and I was able to build me CTR history up again.
Unfortunately the stats package I had (I obtained a better one yesterday) did not allow me to see the IP addresses of the visitors. If it was a deliberate campaign by a competitor we would expect the CTR to be very high, but in fact it only went up from a poor 0.36% to 0.40% but on an enormous 100x increase in impressions. Google have already made the keyword inactive due to zero conversions on very large traffic. They want me to pay 5 times more (£2.50 rather than 50p) per click in order to reactivate the keyword. Google's explanations are obviously c**p. If the extra interest were produced by a TV programme or such like, we would expect better than zero conversions!!!
Miker2, if your problem concerns the Search Network and you're campaign involves bidding on broad match keywords, you can expect such anomalies once in a while. I've experienced a few such occurrences. Just the other day, the cost of one of my campaigns jumped close to 700%, before returning to normal the following day. Anomalies such as these seem to primarily occur during holidays - at least that has been the case for me. If I were you, I would clean up those broad matches, as your experience seems a little on the extreme side.
PPC-Coach It's a 90% search campaign. Masterful As regards the matter of broad matches, this is an Adgroup with one keyword in it, which is 100% specific to the Adgroup.
it depends on the keyword. Is it product based or brand based. Has this keyword become popular all of a sudden or made some big news? A large flux is possible in these types of conditions.
We sell French Food including ratatouille in jars. The keyword was 'ratatouille'. I can't find any reason why the impressions and clicks went up by 10,000% with zero conversions.
uhhh.. was this around Nov 6th? ratatouille is a movie and based on release dates around the world you are going to get traffic spikes.
No it was from 3-23 March 2008. Our ad reads Ratatouille French food, cassoulet, Patés and much more oururl.co.uk The film has been out in the UK for months. However your thinking may be good. I notice the DVD came out in the UK on Feb 11th, but the graph is flat until March 3rd 2008. From 2nd Feb-2nd March we had 0 (zero) search clicks and 170 content clicks (6 per day) From 3rd March-9th March we had 236 search clicks (33 per day) and 80 content clicks (12 per day)
Here is the lesson learnt: 1. Use Google reports to keep a daily check on costs so that you can pick up any spikes at the beginning. 2. Check spikes against visitors. You need to be able to track these. 3. Check the performance of content network. My cost per conversion on these was 8 times more than search. (I have reduced all but one of these to the minimum bid, though I may well decide to disable content network exposure completely. Does anyone have any opinions on this?) and finally..... 4. Don't expect much/any help from Google!!!