Adwords Confusion - Where are these clicks coming from?
-
Ok, I posted two images showing that my Google Adwords search settings are to receive clicks only from google's search engine, as we are doing testing on keyword behavior with a few specific keywords.
The second image will show that we have somehow 7 total search clicks, but not for any of our specific keywords.
I'm confused. . . and hungry. . . I'm 'confungry'. jk any thoughts are welcomed.
-
Thanks for all the help everyone! It appears that those supposed 'phantom clicks' are a result of our product listings being added to the campaigns, and those don't get tracked as individual keyword clicks. Here is the exact response I got back from Google for future reference:
"Having reviewed your account, we can see that you have successfully setup
product listing ads for your campaigns. So, the missing clicks are from
the product listing ads. Please note that the keywords do not record any
clicks for product listing ads.Instead, to view the statistics of the product listing ads, please select
desired campaign and click on 'Auto Targets' tab found beside Ad
Extensions in the central menu bar. This will give you performance
statistics for your product ads." -
Just another thought, have you tried seeing what your search term report tells you in Adwords as this might show you search terms that have clicks against them that are not showing on the main overiew panel.
Go to the Dimensions tab and change the view to Search Terms and drag that out to Excel.
The other possiblity is that Google has just gone crazy....... had to happen some time
-
We get that sometimes also -it shows up as "other keywords" i just go into analytics and find them that way.
-
Yeah, it could be. Thanks for the response. We are now up to 32 phantom clicks for a total cost of $26
-
This test campaign is for all states outside of the one we reside in, so we have not attached this specific campaign to our places account.
-
Also another possibility is that they have been free clicks. I think I have seen this mentioned somewhere in adwords reports, I think it has something to do with when linking your google places account with your campaign - have you done this?
-
I find that sometimes there can be a lag in how things are reported in Adwords. So, perhaps by tomorrow you will see the data as to where those clicks came from?
-
Thanks Mark, good thoughts. However, I haven't made any changes to the keywords, match types or the ads of this campaign. I did edit the campaign settings late last night, which if tracked by East coast time, it may have been search results from Google's search network maybe, but I still think the keywords would have been identified regarding which ones brought in the clicks.
The clicks are now up to 9 clicks, but still no credited clicks to the keyword phrases. However, I don't know how new this is, but I just noticed that the clicks are now 'accredited by the Media Rating Council', which could mean clicks are coming through, they are just not being considered legitimate and 'chargeable', so maybe that's why they are not being shown or deducted from ad spend. Article is here: https://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/answer.py?hl=en&ctx=tltp&answer=153707
-
A couple of thoughts. 1) these are unlikely to have come from the display network as they would not show Under the search total, so safe to say your campaign settings are fine. 2) have you deleted any keywords or edited the keywords in any way (even the match type)? If so adwords won't show the clicks against the original keyword, it will clear the stats for the updated keyword and just keep them in the total at the bottom. E.g you had 2 clicks on "blue widget" and you edited the keyword to [blue widget], adwords will clear the 2 clicks alongside the keyword but keep them in the total below. Mark
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Adwords negative keywords / keyword lists conflicting?
Does any of you had any experience on large 5k+ shared negative keyword lists impacting normal campaign negative keywords in Adwords even if they are not selected on these campaigns? And a second question; does anyone know how selected negative keyword lists can be removed from a campaign? I seem to be able to add them but not to remove them... Cheers!
Paid Search Marketing | | hellemans0 -
Question regarding Google Adwords?
Just had a question regarding Google Adwords. I have an e-commerce store (kiwimodfurniture.com) in the furniture niche and I originally was planning to create a different ad group for each product. Since I have 1300 products I would have 1300 ad groups. However a lot of the products don't have enough search volume and Google won't display my ads. Then I decided to get a bit more broad. I plan on having an ad group for each sub category on my website. For example, modern lounge chairs, modern arm chairs, modern sofas, etc. Question: Is this too broad? Will the ROI be terrible because of this? Thanks!
Paid Search Marketing | | The_Kiwi_Man0 -
Adwords keyword vs exact match kw
Hi guys, I have been using an excellent script that showed me the keywords I was bidding on and the keywords they were matched on by Adwords. I was using the following script: http://www.getelastic.com/exact-keywords-google-analytics/ But I'm under the impression Google changed the way these data can be matched. I now have multiple questions: Does anyone have another script that gives me the same results? Has anyone seen an announcement on why Google has changed this? Might this js solution still be working? http://www.roirevolution.com/blog/2008/02/exact_keyword_tracking_with_gajs.php Cheers and thanks for all the suggestions! Arnout
Paid Search Marketing | | hellemans0 -
Adwords Bulk Discount
Had a few calls recently from agencies offering bulk discount on Google Adwords spends if we pass management over to them and spend more than £5,000 ($7,500) a month, they claim they can offer a 5% discount over what we're currently paying... Can't find anything about this, does Google offer such a deal to agencies?
Paid Search Marketing | | digitalarts0 -
Adwords Product Listing Ads & Google Analytics mis-reporting
I hope you're sitting comfortably, this could be a long one and loaded with questions! Cut to the chase: Why is traffic from google product ads showing as 'organic' traffic in GA? Here's the scenario: Google Shopping I have thousands of products in a feed to google shopping (froogle, google base, google merchant, whatever you like to call it, I'll settle for google shopping for the purpose of this question). The URLs of this feed is tagged with GA tracking data (notably utm_source=GoogleBase&utm_medium=Product-Search), I have also tagged this with internal tracking which comes through in the back-end to assign orders to that specific source. In this case 'GOOGLEBASE'. Adwords Product Listing Ads As you know, a new (ish) feature of adwords pulls in your products from google shopping so that you get a richer ad (image, title, price) and displays this in the 'advert section' of the SERP. Once setting up a few of these, I noticed I was getting a fair amount of traffic for these new ads, taking one example, which resided in a relatively specific ad group (advertising Aviation Snips). Naturally, I wanted to find out which keywords were driving that traffic in order to improve the ads, or kill them if they weren't working. What was interesting is that I can't find anything about that traffic anywhere in adwords or google analytics. 254 clicks to 'aviation snips' must show up somewhere in analytics, if not the keywords, then what about the product? Analytics is showing nothing like that quantity of visits to those product landing pages where you'd expect. It's like ghost traffic. Google Analytics Since experimenting with product listing ads the organic traffic in GA has suddenly shot up, looking at the new keywords they are all queries which when I test them show up product listing ads in the SERP so it's obviously the paid listing ads driving this traffic. Why is google reporting these as organic, rather than paid? I also noticed a keyword appear as * in the PAID segment of analytics. I thought this was my missing aviation snips traffic, but digging into the landing pages for the * keyword, they are many different ones. There's a connection between the * and product listing ads, but what is it? Is the traffic being doubly reported? Back End Meanwhile we've seen an increase for orders tagged in the back-end of GOOGLEBASE which makes sense - google are pulling in my google shopping feed into the paid part of the SERPs and these are generating sales. Here are some of my initial thoughts / theories: 1. When google pulls in google shopping results into the organic part of the SERP, these get reported as ORGANIC in google analytics, even if you've tagged them otherwise. It seems they strip the tags out. This makes it very difficult to know if your google shopping feed is working well, or if you are doing well on standard organic traffic. 2. Google isn't separating out traffic as PAID with their new product listing ads, completely skewing the reports. It makes it look like you've gained great natural organic listings when if fact you are paying. 3. With relation to the missing Aviation Snips data - maybe google is showing a huge variety of products for that adgroup (even though it's specific) and therefore I can't see the traffic to the specific products that you'd expect. This I'm most confused about and wondered if I've missed a trick in setting the product listing ads up? I've attached a couple of screenshots which I hope will help clarify some of this. I can see product listing ads being great if you could get proper data to analyse and improve them. So here are my questions again if anyone can help? How do I see which keywords are driving the product listing ads? How do I see the landing pages for the product listings ads? What is the * keyword coming through in GA? How can you get GA to report product listing ads as paid rather than organic? Thank you so much. If I can gather enough data on this all and work it out I'll try to write up in a blog post to help others. 0rOMM.png GUAE0.png fWPL7.png
Paid Search Marketing | | ewanr0 -
Running Adwords Campaigns to show Improvement in Organic Traffic
Hi mozers, I have a new client who contacted because his organic traffic dropped all of a sudden from 5000 visits per month to 300 visits per month. I have been reviewing his website profile and there are several reasons that take me to beleave the agency that managed his account until 3 months ago, was doing PPC to show improvement in the orgranic (SEO Service) traffic. 1. The Website was showing traffic for several highly competitive keywords 2. Most of the traffic 95% was driven to the home page with several groups of keywords 3. The website has just a few external links with anchor text not related to keywords sending traffic. Is anyone familiar with this type of practice? Thanks in advanced.
Paid Search Marketing | | SEOPractices0 -
Does increased adwords traffic boost your search engines rankings?
Does paying for 1cent low quality clicks give you more traffic that can be used to increase your search engine rankings?
Paid Search Marketing | | nutworkweb0 -
Tools to Discover the Keywords Competitors are Buying in Adwords
Is there a tool that you can use to find out what words a competitor is using for google adwords?
Paid Search Marketing | | jaredspencer1