I've been using AdWords since 12/01/07 with great results and have been very pleased. I noticed that when modifying ads, adding new keywords, etc., that Google gets crazy for about 24 hours and the stats are terrible. After 24 hours they build back up to normal levels. This time I'm stumped, and I don't think it is a coincidence with an external event (competitor's higher bidding, etc.), but rather a problem with AdWords.

I use 27 keywords and one ad group of six ads, all selling different desktop PC models. All link to the same landing page, but jump to a different HTML anchor for each specific model PC. That way they see the specific PC in the ad, but don't have to click anything else to see the other models.

At 11:45 PM on 03/24/08 I doubled my monthly budget from $200 to $400. I examine statistics with one week granularity, and wanted to establish a one-week baseline for budget doubling versus my old $200 budget. If there results were acceptable I'd leave the $400 budget in place and continue to refine other changes on a weekly basis. Below are the results, before and after the budget doubling. Keep in mind, -no- changes were made other than the monthly budget and campaign-wide max CPC. The max CPC was always higher than I've ever actually used for my keywords ($0.90 - $13.33).

February 1 - 29

$200 Monthly Budget
$6.66 Daily Budget
$6.66 Max CPC
Budget Optimizer On

1,478 Clicks (60/day)
1,905,792 Impressions (65,717/day)
0.07% CTR
$0.13 CPC
$190.52 Cost ($6.57/day)

March 1 - 24

$200 Monthly Budget
$6.66 Daily Budget
$6.66 Max CPC
Budget Optimizer On

996 Clicks (42/day)
1,154,607 Impressions (48,109/day)
0.08% CTR
$0.16 CPC
$158.46 Cost ($6.60/day)

March 25 - 26.5 (3:00 PM - 3 Hours)

$400 Monthly Budget
$13.33 Daily Budget
$13.33/$0.90 Max CPC
Budget Optimizer On

19 Clicks (13/day)
27,055 Impressions (18,037/day)
0.07% CTR
$0.15 CPC
$2.87 Cost ($1.91/day)

On 03/14/08 I added keywords 26 and 27, which may explain the differences between stats set 1 and 2. For the last set of stats, the results are based on 1.5 days for today and yesterday. They were taken at 3:00 PM, and I calculated the daily results by counting today as 0.5 days since Google could have been 3 hours behind in reporting. There are two values for max CPC because I first used $13.33, then changed it to the recommended $0.90. Either way no keywords have ever been higher than $0.20 in practice.

I understand that I can manually set my CPC, remove some keywords since there are so many (27), etc. I've read a million forum posts, watched the Black Book DVD, and all that. What I'm wondering is:

1. Why would I get less impressions and clicks after doubling the budget of my already-successful campaign?
2. Should I continue to wait things out to see if it changes?
3. Is this typical of budget changes?
4. What are the odds this is actually the result of insanely-coincidental external factors?

Thanks so much.

I'd like to say that I do not consider myself an Adwords expert at all. Take everything I say with a bottle (not just a grain) of salt.

1) lots and lots of variables here. Both in terms of what Google is doing, what publishers are doing, and what your competitors are doing

2) Probably. Comparing just 1 week of data, to just 2 other weeks of data, is a very small data set. I'm not saying sit for months on it, but give it at least 1 more week. Give Google a chance to adjust to your changes, and see if it was just a "bad week"

3) Not entirely sure. I can't say I've seen/heard of this to much

4) I don't think they would be that "insanely-coincidental". And not every factor has to be involved. Just 1 or 2 competitors getting crazy with their spending could really impact things.

EDIT:
We're also at the end of a financial quarter. If some of your competitors have their budgets based on quarters, they may have a bunch of extra cash they they needed to spend quickly in the last month, and chose to dump their funding into adwords. We're also looking at a possible recesion coming up. Marketing departments may be worried that their budgets will get slashed soon, so they're increasing spending before they start to see their money disappear.

Thanks for the reply. That info is definitely helpful.

After a second day of dismal results, it looks like two things were occurring:

First it appears that the budget optimizer was not automatically increasing my bids to my maximum CPC set in my campaign settings. It was keeping it at the old value, which interestingly had also been being enforced improperly. The old value was $6.66, but the actual max CPC being allowed by the budget optimizer was around $0.25. When I changed my budget from $200 to $400, I changed the max CPC from $6.66 to $13.33. The budget optimizer ignored this. The problem with lack of impresssions was caused by the max CPC bid being set too low by the budget optimizer.

Second it appears that for whatever reason the minimum bids necessary for many of my keywords to get my ad on page one have increased significantly. Since my max CPC had stayed the same I was getting less impressions despite the higher budget.

These two things combined practically nuked my daily impressions, and Google's error in not properly adjusting my max CPC also resulted in my daily budget not being met.

To resolve the issue I set my max CPC to $10. I don't think the specific number made the difference, but just changing the value (for the third time) seemed to snap Google out of its error and allow it to start raising the keyword bids. They're now automatically set around $0.40. The change in results was almost immediate.

It is only the second day of semi-acceptable results and the fourth day of weekly statistic collecting, so Tuesday morning I'll have more complete results for the week. I'll post again with those results. Thanks everyone.

I haven't used AdWords yet so I'm just kind of shooting in the dark here, but Google might also have some sort of minimum plateau for landing page quality vs. bid price, ie, the higher you bid, the better your landing page quality has to be. I know landing page quality is a factor for AdWords, but I don't know if they have a formula similar to what I described above. Even if they don't, however, improving the quality of your landing page can never hurt.

As an aside, is posting your Adwords numbers in compliance with Google's TOS?

I don't know how landing page quality is determined, but mine should be pretty good. The ads take the user directly to the product being advertised, which includes its basis specs, as well as a buy now button at the same price as the ad.

As an aside, is posting your Adwords numbers in compliance with Google's TOS?

I'd read that initially it wasn't allowed, but that Google had changed their TOS to allow it, at least to some degree. In "do[ing] no evil" I'm hoping they won't give me any problems. They're already treading on thin water in my book, as compounding my AdWords anomalies is the fact that their technical support staff has not responded to my ticket after three days.