I use to get around 0.06 CTR on adword compaign, but recently like 2 days ago it dropped to 0.01%; therefore, i'm not getting many clicks. How can this happen so fast? I adjusted my daily spending from $30 to $40 then back to $30.. Could that be the problem? Also am I allowed to promote identical links with different text ads?
imo your CTR is pretty low, you should focus on your target keywords/websites and secondly on your ad text.
Check to see if your average position has decreased. Obviously, lower rankings can produce lower CTR (generally speaking). Also, check your quality scores too. If they have dropped that will affect your ranking and minimum bids. If your minimum bids have increased beyond your bids then your keywords have gone inactive.
Your campaign clickthrough rate could fall if you get a lot of additional impressions on the content network. If you're getting a 0.01% CTR, I'm guessing you've included the content network in your figures. You really have to analyse the search and content networks seperately. And on the content network, disregard the clickthrough rate - it really doesn't tell you very much.
Another thing could be competition. Always check that out when things change for search. Even if they don't change, you should always be checking it out and seeing how your ad looks compared to everyone else's and where it's actually showing up (not just average position). Even on the content network, maybe some one with a similar ad but better and more appealing is showing up above you and undercutting your hits.
Do a report on your keywords. If some have high impressions but no clicks then they are helping with your bad numbers. High impreesions is not always a good thing.
greatzealot, make sure you have turned off the 'Content Network' in your campaigns. That will likely improve your CTR right away.
I did a small test on my adwords campaign, before it was like 2.5%. Tweaked a little bit last week to see it at 3.7% today. Since I'm a beginner in this, I don't know if it's good or bad. But what I did was, went through each keyword to see the relevance of that particular keyword to the business, had separate ad variations for certain set of keywords which are highly targeted and continuously monitored all that for 3 weeks. The important things to keep in mind are, (i) categorising the keyword (ii) the ad variations (iii) the ad you are going to display (iv) if possible do something for the landing page. Hopefully this will do the trick for you.