It's Not All About CTR... Or Is It?


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Forum Index · Search Engine Forums · Marketing , Traffic Building and Advertising · Pay Per Click - Google/Yahoo & Others · It's Not All About CTR... Or Is It?

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imagebbs Joined: Jun 20, 2007 # Posts: 6	Posted: 06/20/2007 10:17 pm Hey there - First post, nice forum you have here! I am an AdWords advertiser with what I'd call an intermediate level of experience and expertise. I recently launched a rather large campaign (100,000 keywords...needed Google to bump my account for this!) with well over 100 ad groups. In this particular market, there are not a lot of advertisers for the keywords I'm bidding on...like 4 or 5 in total. And it seems that NONE of us have our ads showing 100% of the time. I can see my ad showing most of the time on the partner sites (ask.com, etc.), but less so on Google itself... So in an effort to get my ad showing more, I've started to monkey my bids. Even though Google says my campaign budget is OK, I went ahead and increased my daily limit by a factor of 10. Now it's only been one day since I did this, but even in this one day I was very surprised to see that my total number of impressions for the day only increased slightly from what it was with the lower daily limit... But then it dawned on me... How many times my ad is shown is not just about bidding, but also about CTR... which, most of the time, I'm happy about...because often I'm in competitive markets....wanting to grab as many clicks as I can from my competitors.. But in THIS case...where competition is low yet # of impressions is high....I don't really care about my CTR.. in fact, I've lowered my max CPC to $0.07 since there are very few advertisers here. And of course in doing so my CTR has gone down... I figured by lowering my max CPC yet at the same time raising my daily budget, then I would increase the chance of my ads showing more often and ultimately get a better ROI. But now I'm concerned that lowering the max CPC will bring my CTR down to a point where it's impacting the relevance factor (in Google's eyes), ultimately allowing my ad to be shown less. So I guess the question is... should I be justified with this concern? And then, what should I do? And then finally, in general... If an advertiser wants his ad to show all the time, apart from switching to "Accelerated" delivery, is it considered a good strategy to consistently set a higher max daily budget than you would ever reach? Ehh, I know that's a lot of information and questions (and all for my first post!). Very grateful for any insights! Thanks and regards, - Dave (Copy Shortcut)

dudibob Joined: Oct 13, 2005 # Posts: 1430	Posted: 06/21/2007 02:49 am Hey Dave, welcome to SEF and that is quite the first post Firstly, it sounds very strange that your positions changed when you changed the daily budget as this does not affect the position of your ads (unless the Google boys noticed you increasing it 10 fold and bumped you up lol), the position algo is made up of CPC, CTR and trust which is a hidden value. So if your daily budget is a £5 or £500,000 it doesn't make a difference to the positions of the ad, just makes them appear for longer Also if your appearing in Ask, AOL and whoever else is in the 'Google Network' and it's not working well for you, opt out see if things improve. Hope that's helped clear things up for you Imagebbs (Copy Shortcut)

imagebbs Joined: Jun 20, 2007 # Posts: 6	Posted: 06/21/2007 09:22 am Hey there - Actually the daily budget change did NOT have an effect on my average ad position. It had an effect on CTR for sure, but not position... sorry if I gave the wrong impression. Still struggling with having my ads show up consistently.. I have since switched to "accelerated" yet I still don't see my ads much of the time. Perhaps I just need a general primer on AdWords bid management and how it effects ad delivery... - Dave (Copy Shortcut)

flyingrose Moderator Joined: Oct 30, 2003 # Posts: 3361 Website	Posted: 06/21/2007 10:26 am Welcome Dave and boy am I glad you're here. Thank you for bringing up this issue. I have seen it come and go in accounts and it isn't an easy one to get a handle on. There was a time when I felt I had a clear understanding of the variables involved in Google's algorithms. "Back when" it was easier to get their system to predictably show ads. Although perhaps I was being egotistical, I believe their system is getting continually more complex which is why I am virtually certain that it is using neural networks. (If anyone can point me to confirmation of this I would be very appreciative.) Google's system has the side effect of teaching a person humility. Getting consistent results from it today is an ever-moving target. For every account that stabilizes another wants to shipwreck. There are now so many variables that interact and effects that Google's Reps say are not that I can no longer guarantee results to advertisers where I could easily do so. Read the recent discussion on Erratic ad placement in AdWords for just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to why ads don't display consistently. And then we'll take up in this thread what may be causing what you're seeing. I'm going to post this and then start a new post to make it easier to separate these comments from my theories about causes. (Copy Shortcut)

flyingrose Moderator Joined: Oct 30, 2003 # Posts: 3361 Website	Posted: 06/21/2007 10:46 am Let's start with some observations: 1. Google's system sometimes refuses to show an advertiser's ads even when there is so little competition that there are only a few ads on the page. 2. Google's recommended daily budget function is and has been seriously broken. If your budget is inadequate your ads will not be shown for ever search. If setting your ad display option to accelerated changes how often your ad appears that is a clear indication your budget is NOT high enough no matter what their recommended budget function says. See the other thread linked in the post immediately above this one for more details on that issue. 3. Although Google's Reps have ALWAYS insisted that just adjusting bids and making no other changes in an ad group or campaign WILL NOT affect your ads. I have always observed that it definitely does. The stranger thing is that is seems to affect CTR worse than impressions. 4. I have seen advertisers report that if Google is unable to charge their credit card their traffic drops. I have also seen them report that if they increase their bids/budgets or their CTR improves their impressions start rising - sometimes dramatically. 5. Even when an advertiser's impressions stay roughly the same, their CTRs and - most importantly - their CONVERSIONS - vary dramatically day to day. There is one theory that could explain all of the above. What if Google feeds the "best" ads (read those most profitable to Google) to the better (read higher income for Google) sources of traffic? What if Google has a lot more overall ad space available for your ads than you know about and their system changes where it chooses to display your ads based on all the variables involved (CPC, CTR, maybe even conversion rates and cost per conversion)? In "the old days" CTRs and conversion rates were fairly consistent over long periods of time. If an advertiser was receiving about the same amount of traffic they would consistently generate roughly the same percentage of sales from the traffic. Now minor adjustments in bids (down ten cents if average ad position was under 3.0) can result in having the same amount of impressions and frequently even a higher CTR but a drop in conversions. What if lowering your bids slightly drops your ads off some good, strong conversion sources onto lower quality sites that rarely generate sales? (Copy Shortcut)

imagebbs Joined: Jun 20, 2007 # Posts: 6	Posted: 06/21/2007 10:04 pm flyingrose, Some excellent observations you've documented there...I've certainly seen some of those myself! Thanks for your informative reply, it's obvious you're quite an expert... Also appreciate your admonition to go read the other thread on erratic ad placement. I made sure I copied your "manual method" to check budget sufficiency and saved it separately. And following that advice, it would appear that this market doesn't get quite as many searches as I initially thought...I did in fact set my Campaign to Accelerated, and didn't even come close to spending what I thought was a modest amount. So either I'm not bidding on all the keywords I should, or I was just way off base with my planning. Related to this, even with my ad delivery set to Accelerated, my ad still wasn't showing up consistently on Google. And this was with a very high daily budget (much more than I would ever expect to be charged in clicks). I'm beginning to buy your theory that other advertiser's bad budgeting can negatively effect my campaign. :/ I will keep testing though..thanks for the encouragement! Regards, - Dave Grr, this is getting difficult to figure out these days... (Copy Shortcut)

flyingrose Moderator Joined: Oct 30, 2003 # Posts: 3361 Website	Posted: 06/22/2007 01:48 pm Hello Dave, I have been working in large numbers of AdWords accounts for over four years. It has gotten progressively more difficult as the complexity of Google's algorithms has increased. If you have Google Analytics you can check to see how much impact other advertiser's bids and budgets are having on the positions of your ads. Look for the average positions for the same keyword phrase varying enormously over a small amount of time. I have found that keyword research tools and Google's estimators are very inaccurate. The ease of repeating searches, especially when using toolbars, can lead to greatly inflated search numbers. You may be able to come up with more keyword phrases or additional niches to increase your traffic. One very important factor that many advertisers have not quite grasped yet is that searching on your own keyword phrases without clicking on them reduces CTRs and increases CPC and advertising costs. It can also lead to Google's system deciding they are not relevant and actually disable keyword phrases. (Copy Shortcut)

cgar23 Joined: Mar 22, 2007 # Posts: 19	Posted: 06/22/2007 01:58 pm Another side thought: I'm not sure how long your specific ad groups/ads/kws have been running but I've noticed delays of up to a week for new material getting full play. That is, whenever I make changes or add something new Google seems to almost keep it in the kiddie pool for a couple of days before allowing full exposure, traffic, impressions, etc. (Copy Shortcut)

flyingrose Moderator Joined: Oct 30, 2003 # Posts: 3361 Website	Posted: 06/23/2007 02:41 am Ads start to run almost immediately at google.com but will not run on any partner sites until manually reviewed by Google. Although usually that happens within a day or two, when they get backlogged that can be up to a week. Impressions seem to vary far more now than they used to and I see a definite drop even when the only changes made are bid adjustments. (Google consistently says that bid changes do not affect impressions or clicks. (Copy Shortcut)

mj1256 Joined: Jun 05, 2006 # Posts: 809	Posted: 06/23/2007 08:08 pm you know how to get FlyingRoses attention (Copy Shortcut)

imagebbs Joined: Jun 20, 2007 # Posts: 6	Posted: 06/26/2007 08:07 pm Update: I ended up pausing this campaign a few days ago because I simply could not get my ad to show up consistently...even if I set the ad delivery to "accelerated" with an obscenely high daily limit... :/ But you know what...in the interest of trying to learn some AdWords tricks, I'm going to re-enable it tonight and make some additional adjustments. Two things I'm thinking/wondering about at the moment... 1) How much does account history (and associated historical metrics) play into ad delivery? 2) How important of a role does campaign CTR play into ad delivery? Re: #1 - I've run campaigns on and off in this account for a little over two years. I took a look earlier today and my all-time CTR across every campaign I've ever run is like 2.49% (yeah I know, not great). Do you think this could be one of the reasons why my latest campaign is experiencing such poor ad delivery? Re: #2 - I'm theorizing here that perhaps I need a high CTR established in this particular campaign before Google starts showing my ads more consistently. And if this is the case, I'll probably need to run at a loss for a week or so--sacrificing conversion and dollars in order to get a high CTR so my ads show more consistently. Since I don't have much control of #1 (i.e., historical CTR across all my campaigns), I'm going to focus on #2 right now.. What I was thinking of doing here is to resurrect this particular campaign, tweak my max CPC very high (so I'm consistently in position 2 - 2.5), but set the daily spend relatively low...this way I should still achieve a high CTR but not lose a ton of money in the process. Any thoughts on this plan? And then if I want to go back and address point #1, I actually have a plan for that as well... I had a campaign I ran last year for 5 days or so with a consistent CTR of 16%...(and it was very high volume too!). I suppose I could resurrect that paused campaign for a few weeks and the overall account CTR should increase.. I would lose money I'm sure, since I never got a single sale from it the first time.. but the CTR should go up... If anyone has any comments or suggestions on this "plan", would love to hear them. - Dave (Copy Shortcut)

flyingrose Moderator Joined: Oct 30, 2003 # Posts: 3361 Website	Posted: 06/27/2007 07:50 pm Hi Dave, Google loves algorithms and keeps history on everything. If we start with the assumption that Google wants to display the ads that generate the most income which theoretically would also be the most relevant (because they're the ads that get clicked on the most) it is possible that your combination of CTR and bids is not as strong as the other advertisers bidding on those keywords. If you're running exclusively or primarily broad matched keywords an overall CTR of 2.5 is not bad. If you're running primarily phrase and/or exact match and also using a lot of negative keywords you could probably push it higher, especially if you're bidding into positions 2-2.5. What you're advertising, how you write your ads, and how closely your ads match your keywords all affect your CTR. If you can use highly targeted keywords and use them in the ad titles that can really help. The exception to that is if the keyword phrases are rather long and there are already ads with only the phrase as the title. For those you may be able to increase CTR by using a catchier title and having the keywords in the text of the ad. You can also sometimes add them to the display URL: www.yourdomain/productadvertised. Google favors ads that match the keywords that match the TEXT on the page. Using images as words is not good from an organic SEO standpoint nor for the new Google Quality Scores. If you can land the ads on a page with the keywords in it they're more likely to display your ad. You might try running exact match only and testing multiple ads. It would be easier to determine if your ads show up consistently. Searching on your own phrases and not clicking on your ads can disable them so if you have to search you might want to click on them once in a while. (I have not seen anything pro or con from Google regarding doing that - but DON'T click on your ads on content sites just in case.) I have seen anecdotal information online indicating that Google favors advertisers who spend more, spend consistently, and whose credit cards go through immediately. Having an issue with a credit card can cause them to reduce your impressions. I also see impressions vary more than one would expect and also times when impressions increase, CTR doubles, and sales drop - not a pretty combination. [That also happened when I tested running ads that had been on both Google search and Search Partner sites when I only ran them on Google search - the opposite of what I expected.] That leads me to think that Google may have different qualities of traffic it can serve for your ads and also that some Google partner sites convert better than Google.com. Another cause for variations in conversion rates that don't coincide with variances in traffic might be that some partner sites that display limited numbers of ads convert better so when your ads appear there sales go up and when your position drops and they do not appear on those sites sales go down. I hope you'll come back and let us know how your testing goes, especially if you can get it moving your way. Sometimes time improves results and impressions often gradually increase as your campaign picks up history. [ Message was edited by: flyingrose 06/27/2007 08:05 pm ] (Copy Shortcut)

Curious_Mark Moderator Joined: Dec 02, 2001 # Posts: 2142 Website	Posted: 07/03/2007 06:44 pm Killer thread, really good information here. Nice to see flyingrose never lets this community down! (Copy Shortcut)

imagebbs Joined: Jun 20, 2007 # Posts: 6	Posted: 07/04/2007 09:27 pm I hope you'll come back and let us know how your testing goes, especially if you can get it moving your way. Sometimes time improves results and impressions often gradually increase as your campaign picks up history. Well, I decided to give up on this particular campaign. Though I did manage to make about $325 profit in two weeks, it was too unstable for me to let run... honestly I adjusted my bid prices so much in those two weeks that I almost feel like I got "lucky" to make the $325... Aside from my ad just not showing up as much as I would have hoped, at the end of the day I realized my conversion rate just stunk... About 0.9% after 4000 clicks... and that was with me doing a landing page, etc... sometimes a niche just isn't as strong as you think it is until you let it run for a bit... Ah well, thanks flyingrose and others for your helpful comments in this thread... and don't worry, I ain't going anywhere. - Dave (Copy Shortcut)

flyingrose Moderator Joined: Oct 30, 2003 # Posts: 3361 Website	Posted: 07/05/2007 05:44 am Your recent comment brings up another thing I have noted about Google's system that may have a bearing on this issue. Until last year some time I had noticed that impressions, clicks, and sales would drop THAT DAY if I was adjusting bids in a campaign. I made it a point never to adjust bids on the best sales days. This year and especially in the past few months I have noted those drops affect accounts for at least twenty-four hours after the bids are adjusted. To be sure that was really the cause I tested that in a account that advertises seasonally. I adjusted bids in only one campaign and that campaign died through the entire next day and then recovered while all the other campaigns were fine. Then I adjusted all the other campaigns in the account and only that one campaign had normal traffic the next day. It definitely is NOT my imagination. Google has consistently and ALWAYS insists that if the ONLY changes made are bids that this does NOT happen. I am positive that it does. One possible cause would be competitive ads using automated bid adjustment programs; however, I suspect that is not the reason. These drops are fairly obvious in accounts that have significant amounts of traffic and sales especially if you use the account snapshot charts and look at several weeks' to a month's worth of data. If I can make the time I'm going to document some of those drops to get a better idea what is going on. If adjusting bids is going to affect sales a clear strategy on when and how often to make changes is becoming more important. Great to see you back, Mark. Thank you for noticing. I hope you and your growing family are doing fantastic. Perhaps your baby is old enough now that you can come back more often? (Copy Shortcut)

fdixon Joined: Jul 06, 2007 # Posts: 2	Posted: 07/06/2007 09:24 am Hi, good thread. I'd start analyzing which keyowrds you are bidding on are making you the most money. You could have a high CTR, but if that keyword isn't drawing in the qualified traffic of buyers, it doesn't matter. And it's not the keywords that you bid on, it's the actual search query that the visitor typed into the search engine that matters most. You need to hack Google analytics to show actual search query, because they GA only gives bidded keyword info. Use keywordradar.com or xtreme conversions to do this. (I use keyword radar because you can rotate split-tests in one landing page) Since I started tracking my sales by keyword, I was able to turn off all the "loser keywords" in my account, and save about 50% in PPC charges. Quality score is a big thing also... make sure your keyword appears in the ad and the landing page. Hope that helps! Frank. (Copy Shortcut)

flyingrose Moderator Joined: Oct 30, 2003 # Posts: 3361 Website	Posted: 07/07/2007 08:59 pm Hi Frank, Thanks for the tips on keywordradar and xtreme conversions. I was going to post a link to another method I found using filters; however, the site has removed the information. When you turned off those keywords did it affect your sales? Google Analytics doesn't track all conversions back to source. Many subsequent visits overwrite the PPC tracking codes so they don't get credit for the sales. General keywords often generate sales later and phone sales if your business takes phone calls. (Copy Shortcut)

fdixon Joined: Jul 06, 2007 # Posts: 2	Posted: 07/12/2007 06:47 am flyingrose, Yes, I did have a reduction in sales, but my reduction in PPC costs left me in a winning position. For example: Month 1: red widgets: Cost $100 Sold $70 Lost $30 cheap red widgets: Cost $100 Sold $200 Made $100 Net for Month 1: $70 Month 2: cheap red widgets: Cost $100 Sold $200 Made $100 Net for Month 2: $100 (not to mention, the software is spitting out a ton of long tail keywords that I would never have even thought of... that I start new PPC campaigns on) I agree that general keywords is more of a lead generation tactic. Yes, I take phone calls, and I can track my phone sales back to the keyword I bid on. The Keyword Radar software allows tracking of phone sales back to the keyword. Hope that helps. Frank (Copy Shortcut)

flyingrose Moderator Joined: Oct 30, 2003 # Posts: 3361 Website	Posted: 07/13/2007 09:33 am Hi Frank, Thank you so much for posting. Your real-life example is valuable to others. Reduced overall sales and revenue and increased profitability are precisely what I have seen. It is important for advertisers to realize there is ALWAYS a trade-off between maximum sales and maximum ROI. That is a concept I have tried to make clear here and especially lately. For those who are considering hiring someone to manage their PPC accounts, recognize that it is ALWAYS fairly simple to either increase overall quantity of sales and revenue OR reduce cost per conversion, advertising costs, and improve ROI. While many advertisers may be impressed by a promise to do either of those that is no big trick. What IS impressive is finding the balance between the two options. For that, the ADVERTISER'S input and understanding are critical. I can't count the number of times advertisers ask that I ping-pong back and forth between the two extremes instead of striving to find the optimum balance for their business. Even though I consistently explain that increasing traffic can lower profitability or that tightening up spending can reduce overall sales when exactly what I predicted happens they can be unhappy. Bottom line: You can NOT have it both ways. You must choose to favor either maximum revenue or maximum profitability - or ideally, continually make SMALL adjustments and wise decisions to seek the best balance for YOUR business. (Copy Shortcut)

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