Spike in AdWords Impressions

[Infra Guy]

Yesterday only (Wed, 8/10) we experienced a spike in impressions for one single term in a campaign. 21,000 imps vs a normal 10,000 imps for a Wednesday.

The search volume on "Exact"Match for that term doubled and none of the other terms in a 30,000 term ppc campaign gained any increase.

Needless to say, our cost and clicks increased as well.

We experienced a cost jump for the day: $1,200 for the previous 2 Wednesdays jumped to $5,300 yesterday. For one term only.

The visitors converted to leads and the leads seem to be legitimate, so we are ruling out fraud.

Typically a news story would impact the majority of our terms, not just one.

We made no changes to regional targeting in the last few weeks.

Our rank has remained unchanged. (If it had increased, that would explain a click increase, but not an impression increase.)

Our CTR increased from 4.4% to 8.4% which seems a little off...usually an increase in search volume yields a drop in CTR not an increase - nonetheless that would not explain the increase in search volume.

Which leads us to believe that Google must be testing out the placement of the ads - or testing the ads on a new network partner.

The only Google test that I am aware of taking place right now is the Ad Text Length experiment, which we're not knowingly a participant of.

Any thoughts? Anyone?

[Infra Guy]

After a couple of conversations with our Google reps - it looks like the term that witnessed the spike in impressions was most likely the beneficiary of something like a "hot search" - where a partner, like AOL, would feature that term on a home page or other prominent location - thus the top exact match AdWords ad would get the boost.

So far, it's the only possibility that makes sense.

[AussieWebmaster]

There has also been some problems recently with words getting traffic for other words. We found through tracking and the ads themselves being called for other terms - usually high traffic ones and not for content.
The AOL possibility is an interesting addition to what we have to now test for.

[Infra Guy]

Google's "Click Quality Team" got back to us and confirmed that it was an AOL "Hot Search".

We were happy to get the traffic, and the traffic turned out to be quality, however, we way, way over spent that day and being that it takes us about 45 days to recoop the $, it's something we probably would have opted out of - or at least we would like to have had the choice. I suggested to Google that they add some kind of indicator within the interface that appears when a term you're advertising on is being featured as a "hot search". If we're going to increase our spend 4.5x's suddenly, we really ought to think it through beforehand.

Problem is - this is an AOL feature, not a Google feature and AOL really shouldn't have to check with Google when it makes changes to it's site.

Just the same - it wouldn't be that difficult for AOL to feed the 4-5 "hot search" picks of the day back to Google so that Google can throw up and alert to the advertisers in the top 1-3 ranks for that term.

[Discovery]

Perhaps you do as many of us do and set the budget extremely high, knowing that you will probably never exceed it... until now.

Perhaps we will have to double check our 10g/day budget campaigns.

I didn't know about the AOL hot search possibility, do you have more insight into this practice?

Cheers,

Discovery

[Infra Guy]

Yes. We had the budget set at $27,000, an amount which we hope never to hit inside of a day. I forget how we arrived at that amount, I think it was the Google suggested amount that we agreed to use in order to get max exposure. Good point in bringing that up, we do leave ourselves open to spikes in search volume by doing so and we watch it like a hawk.

I don't have any other info about the AOL Hot Search other than what I posted. This is the first time that we've had a term get featured as a Hot Search. Possibly because that term has been getting a lot of press this year. I would guess that AOL chooses which terms to use based on search volume and CPC. This term, in particular, averages around 500,000 searches a month and a cpc on Google averages around $3 (Yahoo - $5) so it's probably a good choice from AOL's point-of-view.

[AussieWebmaster]

Yes. We had the budget set at $27,000, an amount which we hope never to hit inside of a day. I forget how we arrived at that amount, I think it was the Google suggested amount that we agreed to use in order to get max exposure. Good point in bringing that up, we do leave ourselves open to spikes in search volume by doing so and we watch it like a hawk.

I don't have any other info about the AOL Hot Search other than what I posted. This is the first time that we've had a term get featured as a Hot Search. Possibly because that term has been getting a lot of press this year. I would guess that AOL chooses which terms to use based on search volume and CPC. This term, in particular, averages around 500,000 searches a month and a cpc on Google averages around $3 (Yahoo - $5) so it's probably a good choice from AOL's point-of-view.

Though I am sure they are motivated by money I think they are also trying to provide the most accurate info at the same time.
The terms put in the hot search are 'similiar terms' that are searched for by the other people searching for the first term.... a sort of help to find other pertinent results - prompts of other words in that niche.

[AdWordsRep]

... Typically a news story would impact the majority of our terms, not just one. As a moderately related aside to the arc of this thread, it's amazing how intense media attention can sometimes make just one keyword skyrocket, at least in 'special' cases.

One example that I still remember from a couple of years ago: a magazine advertiser running on a vast number of keywords all of a sudden had an enormous (but short-lived) spike of impressions on the single (and unlikely) keyword 'elle'.

Turns out that Elle had run a cover story on Britney Spears, which included a cover photo of her - one of the very first in which she was very minimally clad.

The advertiser saw impressions go from a norm of double digits per day to many thousands per day, for a couple of days.

AWR

[AussieWebmaster]

We see huge spikes for a handful of our terms whenever there is a surge in news about any currency.

[andrewgoodman]

I think "spikes" underscore a shortcoming of the budgeting feature. No one wants to rein in a profitable campaign by setting the budget too low. Usually, you would want the max impressions every day -- until the huge spike kills you. A rare occurrence, but no fun.

So why not an alerts system, that would ping you when your ACTUAL spend reaches certain amounts in a given day? That way, you set the budget high enough to ensure max delivery, but give yourself the option to go in and pause everything if things start to go haywire... or even have it as a default "campaign off" setting over a certain daily spend, but get pinged with the offer to override the shutdown.

After all, people aren't generally logged into their accounts every day.

[andrewgoodman]

In my perfect world, even anomalous behavior on particular keywords could be part of a custom report that gets sent every so often, to help you catch unusual spikes which may not be obvious in the aggregate spend numbers within a large account. You could then choose to act on these changes in impressions and clicks in your own fashion...

[AussieWebmaster]

If you have a bunch of terms in the adgroup it can spike without meeting the daily limit... if you move to meet the spikes is when it gets tricky.