Sharp CTR Drop

[amrrashad]

Hi,

Lately, I'm seeing a very sharp drop in my CTR on one of my Adwords campaigns; the only thing I did to the campaign was add some keywords from the "Search Terms" results. Otherwise, the campaign is untouched.

To give you more details, since Jan 2011, the campaign would run an average CTR of 9%. Suddenly, on April 12th; I see a sharp drop and the most it reaches now is 5%.

Can anyone help me with a few pointers as to why this could have happened? Did I screw it up by adding the "Search Terms" keywords? How could this have affected it if I did not remove any other keywords?

Apologies in advance if this is in another post; I tried using the search function but did not find anything fruitful.

Thanks
Amer

[amrrashad]

Thought I'd update everyone...

I'm going through my ad groups one-by-one to check their performance; so far nothing stands out to me. Everything seems to drop off, for some weird reason.

Will keep everyone posted with updates. Please let me know if you can think of something

Thanks
Amr

[BloggingPro]

Has your quality score dropped? If the score drops Google will run the ad less often, which could equal less clicks. Additionally are you in a seasonal niche and simply people stopped searching for that keyword?

[NastyBlast]

Google calculates AD Words relevancy of algorithmically like everything else. the addition or subtraction of words will change your relevancy. Adding words to campaign is just like adding words to a title it can become more diluted. subtract words and it becomes more concentrated.

if you're managing your AD Words campaign at this fine tuned level you should probably keep track of it by version control so that you can step back/rollback when necessary to see if it was your change that actually made the difference.

[amrrashad]

Just found out why - turns out it was a silly question in the first place

The "Search Term" keywords are the reason why; they were very high traffic keywords leading to a sharp increase in both Impressions & Clicks.

However, the increase in Impressions was much higher than the increase in Clicks, so I saw a sharp drop in CTR (CTR = Clicks / Impressions * 100)

Hope this will help someone

Take care
Amer

[amrrashad]

BloggingPro & NastyBlast - Thank you for trying to help and sorry for not replying to your questions, I only saw them after posting the solution.

Originally Posted by NastyBlast

if you're managing your AD Words campaign at this fine tuned level you should probably keep track of it by version control so that you can step back/rollback when necessary to see if it was your change that actually made the difference.

My plan exactly :thumbsUp:

Hope you had a nice weekend guys