Our sales through Google PPC have fallen off by 50% over the past two months. Ads are good showing 4-6% click through rates. Conversions have just sunk. We have made no major changes to the site other than some to optimize it. Any thoughts?

Can you check where the clicks are coming from. On another forum we have been discussing the situation where a competitor clicks and clicks and clicks to drain your daily limit. Can you check to see if this is the case?

I don't know how, but others on this forum do seem to have the ability to track the ISPs of clickers.

You might also want to check that your ads are only appearing in the countries you want them to appear (if you don't ship overseas) and that you have the distributed advertising turned off to ensure you don't appear on other sites than google (unless it works for you that is )

I see a lot of people who forget to select US only when they only sell to the US market.

Cheers

Chris

I agree... if you don't sell internationally turn it off. MC does. Likewise, I see Adwords popping up everywhere... on all sorts of partner sites. This drives more clicks but not neccessarily more sales or target traffic.

Fraud control is a major issue and I am not sure what they are doing to prevent it. It is the core of their model so I always assume they are taking necceassry precautions but maybe I assume too much.

hey,

We went through this as well. Our sales drop and our cost per click went double. Obviously we look to see what changes. We asked the following:

1. what did we change.
2. What did our customers change - pricing, look , their advertising,
3. Are there new players or more competition.
4. Econemy issues. Is there a lag time in your industrry. Is the econeomy drop from two years ago just now hitting you such as in building industry, etc.

5. Multiple clickers, adtracks or whatever it is, works great.
6 Seasonal issues.

7. are people clicking several times on your add.


Ulitimatley look at your fiqures on a long term basis. Last month was our worst month in three years, but the year so far is the best yet.

Many things can effect your clicks and sales and it is hard to determine. Don't make drastic changes to what has worked in the past. Be confident and trends will stay consistent.

Thanks for all your advice! I can see this is going to be a good forum for us all!

Yes Djangle raises some veru good points, I had a month where our cost doubled and our sales remained unchanged, I found that a couple of new players had started a bidding war which had driven the CPC right up to my max bid... I countered by lowering my max bid and slipping under their war until they had finished beating the crap out of each other.

Cheers

Chris