For about six months I've been running a successful FatLoss4Idiots campaign on the AdWords content network, with several sales daily. Yesterday morning (about 4am BST) impressions stopped dead. When I woke up and discovered this, I thought perhaps I had made some mistake with my campaign - maybe accidentally paused it or something. I hadn't. I checked sites where my ads had been running, and I found that not one of them contained a FatLoss4Idiots ad where the display URL was "FatLoss4Idiots.com". Yet they were all over the place before. I checked Google search pages for several keywords. The ads are still running there. Has anyone else made the same observations? If this is the result of a Google policy change along the lines of the water-gas one highlighted in another thread, why are the ads gone only from the content network and not search pages? Can anyone offer any possible reasons for this? If anyone can see a non-search page containing a FatLoss4Idiots ad, I'd be grateful if you could mention it here. A URL by PM would also be welcome. I've not received any communication from Google about this, despite the fact I've been spending a daily average of around $100 on the campaign for several months (small potatoes for them, I know), and so far I haven't been able to find any mention of the phenomenon anywhere else. I'm reluctant to contact Google until I know more about the problem. I've been running content-network campaigns for over a year now, with several still going strong, and I've not seen anything like this before. My preferred outcome of course would be that it's some glitch in the Google system (they have been known to occur) and that, when they correct it, everything will go back to normal. UPDATE: I see some impressions starting to appear again. That means my campaign was completely down for around 30 hours. I hope it returns in full.
I'm still seeing fatloss4idiots in the content network. How much are you bidding? I've been running some content network ads for my diet product (in sig) with some success - I'm trying to find the right amount to bid though.
Hi Zibblu, If you look at the update at the bottom of my first post you'll see that impressions resumed some time after I posted it. I still can't understand why they suddenly stopped and stayed that way for around 30 hours. It's never happened before with any of my campaigns. I notice that impressions have not reappeared on the site which has consistently brought me the cheapest clicks and the most sales, though I do now see other FL4I ads there. I wonder if the site owner has found a way to block my ads specifically, and this somehow affected my whole campaign - I'm sure this is just clutching at straws, though, and it wouldn't explain why everyone else's ads disappeared too. I manage my bids on a per-page basis daily. Bid amounts range from $0.25 to $150.00. I'm currently bidding on about 30,000 pages.
$150?!?! So you do it all with placements? I've tried placement bidding some - it does make sense to have more control over where you are placing your ads - but it's definitely a bigger time investment. I've also tried the whole AdWords 180 approach - bidding by impression on specific pages... But I've found that very time consuming - although it can definitely be effective. Right now I'm just running a general content campaign. --- As far as your ads suddenly stopping - that doesn't make any sense. But... man I find a lot of what goes on with AdWords to not make much sense. so...
Wow well done on getting anywhere with that campaign I tried a little while ago and had an epic failure. Dunno as to why it went dead maybe you should contact your AM.
Some pages need very high bids to get impressions at all. I only let bids get that high if the effective click cost is reasonable, which means that the actual cost (CPM) will be nowhere near $150. Most of my bids are under $2.00. I change them all by small amounts - up or down - on a daily basis, depending on how they performed yesterday. Obviously, it would be impossible to do this manually for such a large number of placements. I use a custom script to manage my bids.
Ah... I was talking about PPC - you're talking about PPM - although $150 is still pretty crazy And yeah... As far as you using a script - I can imagine that's the only way you could effectively do what you're talking about. I've dabbled a little bit in it - but I found I'd have to do so much tweaking to get things perfect ... it would just take too much time. I'm currently running a banner ad campaign on the content network bidding at 25 cents/click (ended up paying 18 cents/click today.)