Hi I run a number of Adwords campaigns which are mostly profitable and as such I set a large daily budget so that the number of clicks is not limited in any way. The number of daily clicks that Google claims I get seems to stay mostly level. However, I have noticed a large fluctuation in the number of purchases (via PayPal) on my site. I seems to get large bursts of purchases which can last 3 to 5 days and then just a trickle and then another burst, then back to a trickle. The only possible explanations that I can come up with for this are - site downtime ? - paypal limiting the number of purchases some days ? - google charging me for clicks that I don't get ? Does any other Adwords user out there experience the same problem? Does anyone know what else might be causing this? Many thanks vento
It is intersting that you mention that. I run a bunch of AdWord campaigns for my web directory. What I have noticed and was thinking about this morning when I was looking at August results is that my campaigns seem to "burst" at the beginning and then trail off. So, if I start a new ad today, what I seem to be seeing is that the first couple of days I get great conversions - as high as 5%. Then the conversions go down.... Not the clickthroughs - which stay consistant - only the conversion percentages. So, what I was thinking about doing was running campaigns - turning them off - running - off - running - off - to see if there is something to it. It doesn't make sense to me, as the number of clicks is really stable. Oh, by the way - I only run the ads on Search. I have 0% conversion with non-search results.
Hi Stimpsy Yeah, I guess there could be some mathematical rationale for the fluctuations but I would hardly classify my conversions as 'large numbers' and as such, I would expect any unlikely patterns to remain unlikely. The 'burst-trickle' cycle seems to be the steady state rather than an isolated incident. E.g. 5,7,4,11,12,12,2,4,5,3,15,11,12,14,2,4,3,4,4,3,4,3,4,5,4,3,4,2,11,15,12,11,12,2,3,2,5, I wouldn't be so suspicious if the higher numbers were randomly distributed but the higher numbers definately come in 'bursts' (or differing durations) Hi Phynder My campaigns are long running so this is not just a caharacteristic of a new campaign. Also, the bursts do not seem to have any correlation with the time of the month, e.g. month-end, which I could understand if Google were trying to take my daily spend and factor that up to a monthly spend. Also, my daily spend is never exceeded, in fact, I don't think my daily spend ever reaches half of my daily budget (which is good because I don't want to limit the number of clicks I recieve) I forgot to add earlier that I know of no reason why my 'product' should achieve more sales according to other influences such as time of the month, weekends, public holidays, sporting events, weather etc. Regards Vento
That's not really too erratic. Maybe your organic positions are changing. It's kind of hard to say without knowing the site and your Adwords data. Do you use a stats reporting package?
Hi Rob I think the 'trickle' part of the cycle is probably longer than I suggested in my example; It's certainly longer than the 'burst' part of the cycle. I'm not sure what you mean by 'organic positions'. Could you possibly explain please. Thank you. I would understand that if for some reason my ads were showing at lower positions during the 'trickle' part of the cycle (e.g. if other advertisers had increased their bids for a period of time) but I would also expect the number of clicks to drop then too. No, I don't use a stats reporting package as yet, if the business grows then I suspect I may need one !!! The number of clicks never seems to vary by more than 20% from one day to the next. The number of conversions can vary by 750% and the variations come in bursts which, not being a statistician, I just can't get my head around. I would have expected there to be some correlation between clicks and conversions but I cant see any. I.e. I would expect the daily conversion rate to be stable as the number of daily clicks. Thanks all for your help so far. Vento
Your natural (non-paid) search engine listings. You should get a stats package ASAP. Don't wait until your business grows. This can help your business grow. At the very least, you can use AWstats (it's free). You might also want to consider using Google's conversion tracker. I have never used it seems to help many people. It's just too hard to figure that out if you don't know where all of your visitors are coming from. Here's what August looked like for an ecommerce site I have. It's pretty consitent but there are still some big fluctuations. # of orders 162 155 122 125 106 103 99 136 124 132 147 133 177 100 164 182 159 119 109 78 80 159 125 135 120 102 76 89 200 220 265
Hi Rob Hmmmmm, it seems like you get a 200% fluctuation in orders. I still think my 700% is on the high side. Perhaps that might even out in time, as the total number of purchases rises. I do use Google's conversion tracker. Using this is what has enabled me to make my campaigns profitable, i.e. by spending money on the keywords which generate sales (I don't mind the javascript being on the 'thank you' page). The results I get are consistent with the total purchases I get; it's just that the conversion rate fluctuates. Sorry, I thought you were talking about statistical reporting. I do have access to webstats through the hosting service but they are not too good in terms of listing referers and I don't believe their page hit numbers either, so it's virtually useless. I do use web-stats on some other sites but this all begs another question..... My e-commerce site currently contains no javascript; all of the 'clever stuff' is done via cgi perl scripts. Ever since IE had the ability to trap javascript and prompted the user that it may contain something dangerous, I've been a bit wary of using javascript. However, I don't seem to have any problem myself when accessing these sites; I only get the IE warning when I access a page which is resident on my own pc. So.... .... does anyone know how real a problem this is? I.e., if I use javascript for webstats purposes, are users likely to get an IE warning that the page contains javascript and hence may be dangerous? Is this something which is switchable in IE? regards vento
these 78,80 and 76,89 could be weekend days? I haven't counted but surely are the same days in week...