-
Lock down = Big increase in clicks with big decrease in conversions
As with most of the world, the country I’m in is currently in lock down. Since we have gone into lock down I have noticed a big spike in the number of clicks my ads are generating. Normal this would be fantastic, an average increase of 120% in clicks without making any changes, great! Unless… at the same time your rate of conversion drops to 0%. Upon investigating I’ve found that all of this traffic is dropping off of my websites almost instantly.
I find it highly suspect that without any changes being made to my campaigns, click rates have increased 120% while at the same time conversion rates have dropped to 0%. The instant drop offs are just the cherry on top.
Is anyone else noticing the same trends on their accounts?
Feel’s almost as if google are rigging the system to ensure that they don’t lose advertising revenue while the global economy is paused…
-
13 Replies
-
Nope
I only see a gigantic increase in conversions on all accounts I manage.
-
Some of my accounts are absolutely killing it right now.
What are you selling?
EDIT: Also, how are Google ‘rigging the system’ if you haven’t made any changes meaning these clicks must be cheaper to come in greater number for the same budget? That won’t make them any more money. Think rationally about this.
-
Some accounts are having tons more traffic and the conversions follow suit, some behave like you described, and some see a big decrease. It’s very much depending on what they’re selling, things like video games, kitchen tools, etc are millions g it but e.g. mobile phones or exercise equipment are more prone to people just “browsing”.
-
You just described the B2B services accounts I manage including my own site. I think it’s just a large number of competitors are doing competitive research and we are all fucking each other over clicking on each other’s ads.
I also have a SaaS company in the ecomm space I managed spend for and they are killing it.
-
What type of campaign are you using? What are you selling?
Is it CTR that’s going up 120%, or click volume and cost? because these are two very different problems.
Increase in CTR: check user location report, search network partners, placements if using display…
Increase in click volume & cost: Check your search terms.
I’m seeing something similar on an account I took over this week; +80% cost over the previous weekend, and only +20-30% additional conversions, but that account has a lot of pure broad match keywords so my first guess is directed towards that.
-
Absolutely. They have to show you your getting traffic. But only they know if it’s good or bad traffic.
-
same issue for me too, I’m running shopping ads, for the current bid I used to get 10-15 users/15-20 clicks per day with 1-2 conversions but after lock-down, I’m getting 60+ users/60-70 clicks and still getting 1-2 conversions
-
I run 3 eComm accounts and all three of them have been killing it the past 30 days. It’s quite different for someone selling services, however, and I have seen that firsthand myself. For one of my B2B clients, clicks and competition (bids) *are* up but conversions are not. Likely for the reason that many people are just browsing around performing research but not in an economic or temporal position to convert given the lockdowns.
-
I’m doing some local service type businesses (plumbers, hvac, electric, etc.) and it seems high clicks, low conversions. Not sure why as of yet.
-
I’m experiencing the exact same thing.
I’m seeing increased clicks and cpa on campaigns that have rarely changed. These are professional services in the tax and accounting business. I know taxes have been delayed. There is also a lot of confusion around taxes depending on region, county and state factors. That is increasing searches more than ever before.For shopping ads and e-commerce it’s been amazing. Clients are killing it.
—-Solution—-
This is how I am solving for the increased cpc’s, increased CPA’s and crap conversions.
I am using native ads on my DSP with a ton of extra 3rd party audience targeting, pmp deals on premium placements with contextual targeting to drive traffic. My cost/conv is half what it was with search before it went to shit. Again – these are not shitty Adsense sites they are direct deals and a ton of data layering.
I also ran a test on a few placements with the same native ad in Google Ads vs my DSP.
GDN was on average 213% more $ per click for the same placement while having lower visibility.
Test placements included NYTimes, Wired, WSJ, Bloomberg, CNN, Vox and more.
So Google is definitely screwing with those of you who don’t have access to tools outside of Google Ads.
If you want to use my DSP through me to help your clients or even just try it as an agency partner just DM me. I know a ton of you out there don’t spend enough to have access to DV360, TradeDesk etc.
Happy to help. Maybe we can all grow together from this situation and the train wreck that is paid search at the moment.
Cheers!
-
What platform is that?
-
Cuteman – I didn’t say they were faking anything. I said exact match close variants are getting looser. And to clarify that further here is an example. [hire a google Ads expert] a word in my own agency account was triggered by “jobs for Google Adsense professional.” That happened this week. That is not the same intent or close at all. That’s BS. And my clients account is getting pummeled at the moment by misspelled BS close variants of exact match. I can’t share the clients keywords here. That would be wrong of me.
We run ngrams reports on our search queries to find words to add as both negative and positive keywords. I am extremely knowledgeable on the scripting and ML side of things and there is no way that the “close variant” above — is close.
We also looked back at a years worth of data across all client accounts and found that not once in over 10 million in ad spend did a misspelled word ever convert. Not once. I am not saying it doesn’t happen but not for these clients — yet the volume of misspelled close variants keeps going up and up.
We’ve always had a positive ROAS on display ads but they have never outperformed exact match SKAGs. This only started to happen within the last month so I smell something very rotten indeed.
-
I recommend you zoom in on the data and try to isolate the parts of your traffic that show the biggest changes:
– turn on ‘Compare’ function in Google Ads date picker
– compare stats for campaigns, ad groups, keywords
When you find the outliers, zoom in further:
– for keywords, look at SQR reports to find new search terms that might have entered your game
– for ad groups and campaigns, zoom in on devices, audiences, demographicsYou might also want to have a look at the time of day data to see if a lot of the new traffic comes in at suspicious times of day. If you decide to do some analyses, please share the result. Curious to learn what you find.
Log in to reply.