I have a few ad groups running in Canada that are, in general, very low Traffic. I am getting maybe 20 - 100 impressions for the whole ad group per day. In general the traffic is pretty constant but I am beginning to notice an odd pattern. Every so often one of the exact match keywords will generate over 100 impressions in a day with no clicks. This seems to start early in the day and continue throughout at a fairly steady pace. The keyword that is being triggered is almost always the same one and is what I would call the most obvious "type in" phrase (the one that I built the ad group around). If I am on the ball and see this happening I pause the keyword to stop it from ruining my CTR but I'm not always watching like a hawk. When I turn the keyword back on again the next day traffic invariably reverts to normal. It could well be innocent traffic where one person is just searching something to death but it seems too much for that. The fact that there never seems to be a click associated with the blip in impressions and that it always seems to follow the same pattern on the same keywords is beginning to make me suspicious. Anyone got any bright ideas as to what the cause could be?
I wonder if all those impressions are coming from the content network. If that is in fact the case, you need not worry about it factoring in to, say, your quality score which partially drives your CPC rate on keywords. If you wanted to, you could choose not to have your ads run in the content network.
Are your keywords set as broad matches? If you havn't try exact matches. I would also use negative keywords if you havn't already.
Some are broad matches but there are also phrase and exact in there. The keywords that are exhibiting the problem are always exact matches though. I also have several hundred negative matches although this obviously wouldn't affect an exact match impressions anyway.
Just for research, try using the keyword generator tool provided by Google with your keyword in question and see what gets returned. You might find that there are few words that might be triggering it in completely unrelated areas. Furthermore, maybe try limit the ads visibility per location feature; scale it back to a smaller area (start w/ city and work your way out). Do you use any other data monitoring programs besides Google's?
Just to recap: The problem only happens with a few exact match keywords along the lines of [red leather widgets] The keywords that are affected are low traffic (maybe 5 - 10 impressions per day) with a CTR of over 5% and great quality score. every so often the impression rate jumps from 5-10 impressions in a day to 100+ on this exact match keyword. There are never any clicks when this happens. There are maybe another 30 keywords in the adgroup but these are never affected. I can't detect a pattern as it doesn't happen very often - maybe one day in 30 or so. If I notice it early enough in the day I just pause the offending keyword for 24hrs. The symptoms are as if there is a machine that performs a search every 5 minutes for a day and then goes to sleep for a month. The problem only ever happens with [red leather widgets] never "red leather widgets" or [widgets red leather]. It also happens with [green leather widgets], [blue leather widgets] etc. etc. Limiting the campaign geographically will reduce a low traffic campaign and serve no purpose unless I exclude the location responsible for the unwanted impressions (assuming they all come from one place that is). I already run the campaign at specific times of the day and can't really pinpoint a time of day when then this happens or even a specific day of the month.