I own a local service business in central Florida. For the last three years we have done about 80% of our business using Google Adwords. But since January we have seen impressions and clicks drop dramatically as well as conversions. Is this due mainly to the economy or are there other factors that I am not seeing? Also what can I do about this if anything? Thanks in advance, Big V www.southlanddogtraining.com
Well, mr. G changed algo again and the economy also plays a role. I think almost everybody feels it. I DEFINITELY DO!!!
We'll, what I do is tweaking my site. A change here and there to see if something positive will come of it. Also, visit forums and see what others have to say.
Hi Big V, It could be that less folks are searching on the keywords that used to give you higher volumes of clicks and conversions. In order to really figure this out, you need to run a Search Query report for the ad group or ad groups that have decreased in impression and click volume. You need to do this by month (there is an option for 'monthly' in the reports section). You could then take the data into Excel and do a pivot table in order to understand impression volumes and click volumes by actual search query, and not just by keyword. The reason this is important is that Google does change up which search terms are matched to which broad-match keywords. So, a broad-match keyword might have increasing or decreasing impressions not due to underlying user search query trends, but instead due to Google making a change as to which search queries it is matching to which broad-match keywords. I would also go in and do a 'campaign' report, by month, and include 'impression share' data - check all the 'impression share' options, which might be abbreviated as 'IS'. You can then see whether you are seeing less impressions and clicks due to lost impression share, and further you can see if this is due to budget settings (mostly likely it is not) or due to your ads ranking lower on the page. Another way to see if your keywords are getting less searches would be to use Google Trends, which can be a good tool to see search trends for specific search queries over time. I hope that helps. Feel free to ping me if you would like additional help. Terry at cpcsearch dot com.
Could be many reasons, the first one being that less people search on your keywords. You have a link to a dog training site so I assume that may be the site you are advertising. Maybe there are less dogs that need to be trained in your region. If the recession is hitting your region hard, some people will postpone getting a dog or postpone spending money on dog training. Also consider your ad's position. If it was 8th, other advertisers could have came along and push you to 9th or 10th which is the second page and thus reducing your exposure. Maybe a competitor is advertising off line such as radio or newspapers. All things to look into and consider.