Adwords question. Best method for slowing down?

Hi paultaylor,

#4 will likely give you the best ROI during the the down time. However, your current optimized bids will all be adjusted out of optimized settings (assuming bids are currently optimized). So there will be a some period of time to get all of your bids back to optimized levels when you return from you hiatus. Just plan for that. Depending on the way your account is structured it may take a few days, or a few weeks to get back to optimized levels.

During your hiatus it is likely that competitors will up their activity. When you return to the auctions in full force there will be a lot of shifting and jockeying for ad slot positions by your competitors, this may take anywhere from a day to a month, or more, to settle down, depending on the niche you are in.

HTH,

Don Burk

Hi paultaylor,

Yes, it is a little more complicated than that.

It's a very dynamic market. Ad slots are auctioned off to the top bidders, based on Ad Rank score (Max CPC bid * QS = Ad Rank), in a real time ad auction.

When a new advertiser enters an ad auction it can be very disruptive to other advertisers' campaign performance. Any existing advertiser that is out bid by the new advertiser will drop one ad position level and suffer the effects of that loss of ad position. Even the advertiser in the ad position above the new advertiser's ad is effected by their CPC increasing to match the new advertisers bid. All those changes to other advertisers performance will trigger some of them to make adjustment, increasing, or decreasing bids, based on each advertisers bidding strategy.

Likewise, when you exit an ad auction, after being a fixture there for some time, it can cause significant shifts in your competitors bids. Many advertisers use automatic bidding algorithms that will alter their bids based on recent campaign performance. When you exit the ad auction the advertiser in the ad slot above you will see their CPC drop as a result, and all advertisers in ad position below you will move up one level in ad position. These changes will effect the profitability of your competitors campaigns and may trigger more aggressive bidding on their part to exploit the increased performance of results in those auctions.

Besides the automatic bidding adjustments based on algorithms, you also have the human emotional effects that may influence an advertiser to suddenly focus more attention and resources on their new found gains. The ramification can be far reaching in some cases.

As all of these forces play out, things may jump around quite bit. You may find that you need to increase some bids to get back to the same ad slot positions, while others may require lowering to maintain the same level of profitability. It's a very dynamic and ever changing marketplace.

HTH,

Don Burk

I've had some success with this but it wasn't for as long as a month. have you yet weeded out the low performers (in terms of ROI)?

Some years ago, I would have said there's no issues with any of these approaches. Your QS would not be changed and setting back to the original values would have your campaigns continue merrily along the way it did before.


But there's evidence from many over the years that some changes do affect QS and thus CPC and impression share. I have a theory as to why. I believe it might be because in the QS calculation, Google looks only at the last X searches of your keyword (say the last 1000) and not the all-time history. If you pause a campaign, lower the budget and change the scheduling, you are changing the percentage of the last X searches you accrued and this may change your QS.


Completely pausing a campaign would have the biggest effect. When restarting, your QS may be set as if you are just starting anew. This may be less than it was before and hence your CPC is initially higher and this also affects your impression share. It should recover over time, depending on the search volume and how long to get X searches. Of course, during the time it was paused, competitors may have improved.


Lowering your budget may have the same effect if you set it so low your ads don't run at all. This would be my option in most cases. I would decide on a percentage, say 25% of my full budget, expecting only 25% of the traffic. At least, you accrue data over the last X historical searches and your QS is not so much adversely affected.


Running ads only during certain times of day (you say one hour) and if that was in the middle of the night where there are usually less searches (assuming a local campaign), it would be just like turning it off completely. Not an option.


If you lower bids, you may lower so low that ads are effectively not running which is the same problem as the other options. You could decide on a percentage here as well just like the budget and let it run with minimal effect. The problem is that you affect your ad ranking and it may not take much to drop you to the second page. Also, very often, conversions are better in the higher positions so your conversion rate may drop. Probably not what you want, even though you want to slow things down, it may not result in a better ROI. So my option tends more to #2, lower the budget.