One of the most stressful situations you can experience with Google AdWords is sudden change in your performance that you can’t explain right away. Add to it, your boss or client sending email after email demanding an explanation to why their visits or sales on the website are down. All of this creates a very stressful environment.
With 5 years of experience working with in-house and Client campaigns, I have seen it all, and I’ve had all types of people “on my back” demanding explanations. After a while, you tend to get rather good at figuring out exactly what has gone wrong and providing a sound explanation with clear steps to make everyone happy.
My biggest takeaway from trying to analyze sudden performance changes is that you need to look deeper. Simply reviewing your overall campaign performance in the Dimensions tab over time will not suffice. You need to dig into the actual ad groups and get into the nitty gritty. You will often be able to see a pattern after you analyze 4-5 ad groups where performance has dropped.
These are my tips to where you should look and what the usual reasons are when you experience a decrease in click volume from your AdWords campaigns.
Scenario 1) Did you Experience a Worse CTR alongside your Lower Click Volume?
One of the most common scenarios when experiencing a lower click volume is that your CTR also goes down. You basically have two metrics that impact how many clicks you have:
- Your CTR
- Your number of impressions
In this case, we are going to investigate 3 reasons to why your click volume went down if your CTR has also decreased:
A) You Changed Your Ads
If you have changed your ads around the time your click volume decreased, then this is normally the reason. A lot of advertisers don’t think of safeguarding their backs when they’re creating new ad variations.
Testing ads in AdWords is exactly the same procedure as regular A/B testing. You need to have a control ad that will be able to tell you if your new ads are performing better or worse than your benchmark. I’ve often created ads where I thought that it was a waste of time to test them. They were obviously better written, but I still decided to test them. The few times I was proven wrong, I was able to quickly pause the new ads and regain our previous campaign performance.
If you’ve recently changed your ads and subsequently experienced a lower CTR, I urge you to restart your old ads and run a test to see if the new ads are responsible.
B) Has Your Avg. Ad Position Decreased?
If on average you had an ad position of 2.3 and suddenly find yourself having an average position of 3.2, you will see a drastic loss of clicks. Your CTR will be much lower as you descend down the rankings in Google.
There can be many reasons to why your ad position can go down at the same time as you’re receiving fewer clicks. The most common reasons are:
- Your competitors have increased their bidding
- Your Quality Scores have decreased causing your Ad Rank to become lower
- You have decreased your bidding
Depending on what factor is the reason behind the decrease in CTR, you will need to start different tasks.
In this case, I would also like to mention that you don’t have to act like a robot if your click volume starts going down. Sometimes, your competitors will simply start outbidding you to such an extent that you can’t keep defending the same ad positions and thereby click volume.
Don’t just roll over on your back when your boss or Client is screaming for more clicks. They might not be able to see the bigger picture to why you have decreased your bids. Often, you can explain to them that you decreased bids or that your competitors are being more aggressive and come up with a plan for getting more out of AdWords.
C) Competitors Having More Interesting Ads?
One of the reasons for low CTRs is when competitors start aggressive promotions. If you’re selling the same product at around the same price with the same benefits, you will undoubtedly be subject to fluctuations in click-volume, depending on how aggressive your competitors’ promotions are.
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