Help with adword campaign question

Hi Lambss,

Welcome to the wonderfully complex world of AdWords' dynamic ad auctions.

There are a lot of specific details that we would need to know about your ad campaign to give a reasonably accurate answer to your question. However there are a few obvious reasons that could explain what you are seeing.

Time of Day - Most niches will tend to have more orders during certain times of the day. In your case, it may simply be that 9-4pm is the time of day that most orders are placed for your niche. So, even though you have reduced your bids, you still see most of your orders during that time because that is when most of the buyers are placing orders. This would be particularly true for most B2B niches.

Ad Position - While it is generally true that you get more clicks and conversions with higher ad positions, this does vary a bit for some industries and certain niches. It's not unusual to see higher CTR for ad positions around position 4, as well as position 8. The best thing to do is to test to see which ad positions tend to give you the most total profit.

Mobile Devices - Mobile devices are rapidly and dramatically changing the nature of AdWords auctions. For some niches you might see a very high percentage of your evening traffic come from mobile devices. I have a number of campaigns that have been ranging between 40-80% mobile device traffic during the evening hours. This is a recent trend being driven by the rapid adaption of smartphones and tablets for web surfing during evening hours. Conversion rates are often much lower for mobile devices, especially if you haven't built your website using Responsive Design principles. If your website displays perfectly for desktops, and it isn't built using Responsive Web Design, you are likely to see more orders during the hours that must users are viewing your website on a desktop.

Daily Budget Limits - If traffic to your campaigns are limited by budget then you will often have far fewer impressions during the periods where your bids are higher, and more impressions, with more clicks during periods where your bids are lower. Allowing daily budget limits to throttle your ads can seriously harm your potential ROI. Try raising your daily budget limit if your ad impressions are limited by budget.

Keyword Targeting Targeting keywords with low commercial intent could lead to large amounts of traffic from "true window shoppers" as you put it. Eliminate poorly targeted keywords that have low commercial intent by the use of negative match keywords.

Those are some of the things that could lead to the pattern of conversions you have been experiencing and hopefully this information may help you narrow it down to the true cause. It seems to me that understanding why you are experiencing this could be a very useful insight for your campaign management.