Question - I'm running an Adwords campaign for the first time in several years.
Campaign: Display Network, to women 40+, health/beauty related
I have my budget set at $400/day for testing, but no matter what I do, the campaign will only spend about $130/day. It's for a fairly large niche in a decent sized country so I'd think it should be able to blow through $400 no problem.
Here's the weirdest thing:
I've tried it with/without day parting. With day parting it spends around $130 during peak hours. If I turn day-parting off, it spends about the same amount ($130 or so) in the morning and then completely stops giving clicks/impressions for the day.
It's like the account has a hard cap of $130 and then it just turns off. Some days it's $128, others $135 but always stuck right around $130.
I've gone through the Campaign settings and everything seems to be on track.
- Set to spend as fast as possible
- I've tried with/without day parting
- Ad CTRs are around 0.2% (this is display network)
If anyone has any experience with something like this, or an idea why it's stopping at $130/day I'd love to hear it. - Thanks!
Banners or text ads? Whats your relative ctr? What does substantially increasing your bids do?
Text ads. Relative CTR is about 0.7x.
I doubled my bids (using the recommended bid prices and as expected it will spend my budget, but loses money now.
how are you targeting your placements ? keywords ? keywords + interested categories ?
Your relative ctr is a bit low, if your budgets do get spent when increasing bids like you mentioned its a quality score / ctr thing. Boost your ctr. As to why it works fine in the morning, cant know for sure, perhaps the majority of the competitors daypart different times. I'd aim for at least 0.5% ctr in your creatives here.
Edit:
John_smiths comment is important too, but im assuming you run a keyword or placement campaign, broad. Also given that when you increase bids the budget gets spent, the "broadness' of the campaign doesnt seem to be an issue here
Thanks for the info guys and to john_smith - it's keywords.
I haven't used Adwords in ages (haven't had a legit site to run) - Back in 2009 I would just load up a content campaign with some decent adgroups and keywords and it would pour traffic at me.
It's changed a lot, so the advice is appreciated.
Any recommendations on keywords vs keywords + interests vs. straight domain placements?
I start off with the broadest possible just a few keywords per adgroup and gather placement data from there. Starting to experiment with interests atm.
Thanks karimelm. What do you do with the placement data? Do you do managed placement buys?
I create a seperate campaign where i run placements only, based on their stats and block them in my broad campaign so I can optimize per site
*Can even be good difference in performance on the site placement wise. So i weed those out as well and just focus on the ads that give me the highest return
Cool thanks karimelm.
Really strange things happening. The account still wont spend more than about $150 a day. And here is why I think something odd is going on.
Yeah, time to start stalking google support. Sounds like the account is limited in impressions for low quality yes, possible
Are your ads displaying on actual Google search properties or only 3rd party partners (Ask, InfoSpace, MyWebSearch)?
This is a big indication of whether or not your account is in a "lower tier" which I found usually limits spend to about $800/day for about 30 days.
After your account gains authority in various categories: billing, QS, content quality. You will slowly increase.
I have an account about 50 days old that was stuck at a similar spend limit but over time it has risen to about $3k/day now.
Note: The above only applies to "lower tier" accounts stuck on 3rd party search partners.