Google is limiting my impressions! Why? (Advanced Adwords question)

[connorferster]

Hi everyone,

Thank you, in advance, for your time in reading this.

I'm doing an ultra-targetted (two key phrases) Adwords campaign and Google estimates the search traffic for my key phrases ([mens wallets] and "mens wallets") at ~100,000 searches per month. Yet, I only ever get ~200-300 impressions/day (~8,000 - 9,000 impressions/month) for my key phrases with around 15-25 clicks/day. The "mens wallets" keywords are very competitive and I seem to be trouncing the competition.

My ad has been running for a couple of weeks now (with some weeks in hiatus when I couldn't pay my Adwords bill; yikes!) and the ad has been getting a CTR of between 4% and 8%, which I'm thinking is a pretty decently performing ad.

I've got the ad exposed all over N. America, Western Europe, some countries in Asia, along with Australia and New Zealand. I've changed my ad serving settings to "Accelerated" to show ads as fast as possible. My average CPC is $1.50 and I've set my budget to $200/day.

What am I doing wrong here? Why am I not able to tap into the other 90% of the Google traffic?

Why am I still ONLY getting a portion of the available traffic for my keyphrases on Google?

Thanks again,

Connor Ferster

[dburk]

Hi Connor,

There are a number of reasons you may not be getting more impressions.

Your keyword could have competitors bidding higher than you are, particularly for some of the long tail versions that include your keyword as part of the phrase: "buy mens wallets online" or "sale on mens wallets". While your bid may be high enough for your root phrase you could be seriously outbid by competitors for phrases that include your less targeted root keyword. This effect is magnified when you add in Quality Score factors.

The solution is to find as many of those longer keyword phrases as possible and create ad groups for each, or just bid much more aggressively.

Another likely cause for you lower than expected impressions is your daily budget. Let's do the math: 100,000 searches X 8% CTR = 8000 clicks. That's an average of 267 clicks per day. Since search volume varies greatly on a day by day basis, as well as seasonal variations, you could have a potential of more than a thousand clicks in a single day. 1000 clicks X CPC of $1.50 = $1500: Your daily budget of $200 won't cover it, so you ads will definitely be throttled.

The solution is to up your daily budget to at least triple the expected average to avoid getting clipped on heavy search days. Ideally you should make your daily budget way higher so you can take advantage of spikes in searches and use you bid levels to control your spend over the period of a month.

[connorferster]

That's some great advice. Your math showed very clearly why I wouldn't be getting that traffic. Thanks very much for sharing that with me.