Impression Fluctuations

[leehill]

Hi,

I have just taken over an account for a customer and I have been going through the last few months figures and have noticed huge fluctuations in impressions.

Search, Content Search and Search Networks are all active.

The vast majority of the impressions seem to be coming through the content network.

Examples as follows:

72,152
6,665,325
4,766,331
5,236,260
962,416
62,694
44,973
776,845
1,239,112
1,559,283
1,424,697
1,200,945
1,368,673
10,564
23,624
8,744
83,455
125,136
87,460
27,178
5,704
21,484
7,432
332,603
309,380
59,816
117,748
28,077
18,632
158,311
210,735
226,052
44,644



Each of these figures represent a full day, as you can see some days had over 6 million impressions while other days had as little as 5,000. No changes where made to the accounts during this period, all budgets where untouched.

I could understand upto maybe 10/20% but not the figures im seeing.

The industry is loan and debt which you would expect to see such high volumes but the account is showing 25 million impressions for February and only 1.9 million for March to date.

Any Ideas.

Thanks,

Lee

[Mel66]

Not sure but I think this is pretty common in the content network.

I wouldn't worry about impressions - as long as click volumes and conversions are steady, you're good to go.

Melissa

[leehill]

clicks have also suffered as a result of this, obviously if you have 6 million impressions on one day and then 5,000 on another this is going to seriously impact clicks and conversions, which it has done.

[AussieWebmaster]

content impressions can vary largely by events and who is using your ads (not blocking you or blocking others to get you higher) or for that matter who drops or adds content advertising itself.

Those are huge swings though.... the high number days I would think were from people dropping content or having some of their words go inactive etc.... combined with possible events that got more people looking for your keywords or sites associated with them (content ads).

[AdWordsRep]

Search, Content Search and Search Networks are all active.

The vast majority of the impressions seem to be coming through the content network. ...No changes where made to the accounts during this period, all budgets where untouched.... When you say 'no changes', leehill, I am not sure if you mean budget or Max CPC related changes only - or no changes of any kind at all.

I mention this because editing one's ad (even if changing only a single character) can also result in substantial fluctuation in traffic.

This occurs because an edited ad must be reviewed and approved before it may appear on the search and/or content network. This amounts to the difference in traffic to be had from showing on Google alone, versus the traffic from Google plus potentially hundreds or thousands of other sites as well.

(As an aside, many advertisers recommend never simply editing an ad to change it. Instead they suggest creating a second ad with the desired text, and letting both ads run until the new ad is reviewed/approved. At this point they will then delete the original ad.)

I suspect I am not telling you anything new here, leehill, but still think it's worth mentioning just in case you were not aware of these things.

AWR

[leehill]

Thnx for the replies.

No I mean no changes at all, not a single one, when I looked at the account history there had been no changes for over 3 months...I suspect that is why we where given the account.

No 3rd party software was being used so there had been no changes from external sources.

I would just like to trace what happened on the days when the traffic was receiving over 6 million impressions, I know this normally results in reduced quality leads but the company we are managing this account for do not mind, the sheer volume of leads that are being generated at these times meant that the data was valuable to at least some extent, well enough to worth it anyway.

We have now seen quite a big drop in leads and the impressions seem to have stettled down to around 50,000