I have a feeling that many of you share this frustration with me. Over the last few years I have been running adwords campaigns for my clients, and most of the time I do a great job delivering results. But, every now and then I run into a situation like this. Worst part, I know there is NOTHING I can do about it.
At first I thought I would share this issue with the SEJ community and seek advice. But after thinking about it (and having a beer or two) I thought I’d turn this into an open message to Google. The key message here is “WTF GOOGLE…GIVE ME DATA!”
Here‘s the Situation
Below you will see the data of my adwords campaign. I blacked out the campaign name to protect my client’s privacy. If you’re like me, your eyes go to the CTR and you think, “Crap! Either the ads are wrong or the keywords are wrong…..let’s make changes.”
One of the monthly tasks that I preform for PPC accounts is identifying negative keywords and adding them to the ad groups or campaigns. A very critical part to Adwords success! So, to execute this optimization technique I drill down to see the queries that are achieving the ads (found in the keyword report), and what do I find? Nothing but Success! Well, almost.
In the image below, check out the CTR’s on the queries that have activated the ads. Out of this world! 33% ctr here, 6% ctr there, 100% on that query, things are looking good. I don’t think the ads are an issue here.
Pay special attention to the data in the red box (above), .38% ctr, 2,300 impressions, and 9 clicks with a cost of $12.16 per click. This tells us that the negative keyword information that I need is found in that black box! Also, every time an ad is clicked I spend twelve bucks. The worst part is that Google is not giving me the data needed to do my job. What do I tell the client when they ask me if I feel that the campaign is generating the results that I expect to see? Come on Google, let’s work together on this. Broad match modifier
How Do I Optimize Without Data?
Below is four of the same keyword phrase with different match types. I see the broad match has a low ctr, phrase and broad match modifier’s have 0 ctr. Exact match has a decent CTR but with low search volume.
Knowing that the query data in the first image shows high CTRs, I don’t want to pause these keywords. But, I need to optimize the campaign using negative keywords. What’s a guy to do? I really, really, really hope Google’s answer to this is “Spend more money and I’ll show you more data…Optimize your campaign over time.”
Grrrrrrrr………
