Hi, gang! I'm just starting to experiment with Adword campaigns. I created one last night that had a daily budget of $100 and an average CPC of 0.11. I have 19 keywords in the list. I've received 67 clicks so far, totalling a cost to me of nearly $8.00. This afternoon, my ads are not showing up and I've discovered, according to Adwords, that " Your campaign has reached and exceeded its budget for this month." Can you explain what is going on? My cost is far from $100 right now and it's got me confused. I've contacted Support asking about it, but haven't heard back yet. Any info is appreciated.
Contact support, as this "budget message" is shown also when the system freezes your account due some serious problem - may not be the case, but I'll contact them ASAP.
The stats updated and they tell me I've had 1,850 clicks, 23,663 impressions with a single conversion! Seems very strange to me within a day's time in the smaller niche I was in. What do you think? Could it be click fraud?
looks strange this jump to 1850 clicks, maybe your ads has just been reviewed and they are running now on content network. Something is strange: you had a CTR of 7,81% -- this is too high for this amount of clicks - are you sure about these numbers? I suggest you to decrease your bids and go slow as you are having negative ROI - go increasing your bids again as soon you see that your ROI is positive.
I paused the campaign after I saw those numbers. It freaked me out! Very sure about the numbers. I was only running on Google Search and the Search Network, not on the Content Network at all.
The only explanation that I can imagine is that one of more of your keywords got the "Yellow shadowed Centered Sponsored Link" (old blue shadowed...) So you get a big traffic and a good CTR%. take a look into your keywords statistics. you may find one or a few number of keywords that represent most of these 1850 clicks. Take a look if this keyword has a good position average nearing 1.0 ~ 3.0
Yes, one phrase alone (it was phrase matched) drew 643 clicks. The niche has very little competition as far as ads are concerned, so it was very easy to get 1-3 rankings, spending only $0.11 a click.
Just want to add-on that if you feel it can be a click fraud just keep you web stats available in front of you. Check the traffic and referrals and that will show you the real picture, as it will tell how many clicks you got today. For tracking it place some source codes on the Destination URL of your Ad Copy.