Thursday, August 10, 2006
I had a very interesting conversation with Google the other day
about Adgroups disappearing from view or dropping from rankings like a
stone. After eliminating all the obvious causes like maximum CPC,
campaign budget, and landing page quality, it seems the problem is
caused by ads waiting to be manually reviewed by Google.
The nice people at Google told me that every time you change your
bid, advert wording, link, keywords, or anything else in an AdGroup, it
enters a queue to be manually reviewed by a Google reviewer. Until it's
been reviewed your ad can stop running or drop in rank.
Now, even though Google told me EVERY ad is manually reviewed, I
don't think this can be the case because a) they just couldn't have
enough staff and b) this problem only seems to occur for selected
clients or campaigns, so I suspect manual reviews are triggered by the
use of particular keywords or ad text.
The other bombshell is that the Google reviewers don't work on a
weekend, so in other words don't tamper with your ads on a Friday
afternoon because they could be dropped all weekend, or change them on
a Monday morning when there's likely to be a reviewing backlog.
This revelation also explains the frustration many of our clients
have previously reported, of making a change to an ad, then it
disappearing, so they make another change to try and get it back. What
they don't realise is each time they make a change, they go straight to
the back of the review queue again. Best to make a change and wait for
it to go live before making further changes. This should also better
help you identify the outcome of your ad amendments anyway.
Of
course for Google Adwords accounts we manage on behalf of clients, we
can chase up getting ads off review or even warn Google in advance of
major changes that are due to be made to campaigns to save time later
on - just a small plug for our Adwords account management services!