AdWords campaign exploded

Dear BHW Community,

We ran some pretty good AdWords campaigns and steadily have been optimizing them.
Cost/Conversion was improving a lot, and we were getting lots of Conversions and were happy with the results.

In September though, the campaigns were only using a slight portion of their assigned budget, a lot less than what it used to be before.We thought, that may come from competition rise, although we didn't find any proof for that.

Now, in October, suddenly the Budgets never make it through the day and Cost/Conversion increased a lot, in fact it exploded.

Is there any reason we don't see for that?
Or is it even possible that some competitors are actually using scripts or such in order to neglect any true sales?

Hope someone has some sort of answer on this.

Thanks
Chris

If the competition hasn't gone up, I'd take a look at website performance.

Slow page speed or decrease in quality score can both impact your campaign performance.

While it is possible to use bots, that clicks on your competitors' ads, it is not really commonly used. But I've seen it before.
Is the cost per click still the same?

I dont think that anyone would do fake clicks to your camp unless u are in very competitive niche which i doubt. To do nowadays fake clicks u need to know what to do cause Google has become pretty smart reversing those clicks in some hours (i have got x,xxx worth of fake clicks on some accs and all will be deleted in some hours). But you need to check your niche if it is seasonal or hyped (buyers can come suddenly and in xx days not interested in that product/niche anymore). Or if anyone has came to your niche with better catchy adcopy than yours.

What a dramatic title If you are not seeing any chargebacks, you are good to go.

Thanks a lot for all your replies.

Davedavidson said:

If the competition hasn't gone up, I'd take a look at website performance.

Slow page speed or decrease in quality score can both impact your campaign performance.

Click to expand...

Thanks Dave. We actually improved the frontpage 2 weeks ago, reduced loading times significantly and made a lot more lightweight.
Quality score hasn't decreased either.

InstagramDude said:

While it is possible to use bots, that clicks on your competitors' ads, it is not really commonly used. But I've seen it before.
Is the cost per click still the same?

Click to expand...

Actually cost per click went up a lot and Cost/Conversion is now at five times it was before.

ppcads said:

I dont think that anyone would do fake clicks to your camp unless u are in very competitive niche which i doubt. To do nowadays fake clicks u need to know what to do cause Google has become pretty smart reversing those clicks in some hours (i have got x,xxx worth of fake clicks on some accs and all will be deleted in some hours). But you need to check your niche if it is seasonal or hyped (buyers can come suddenly and in xx days not interested in that product/niche anymore). Or if anyone has came to your niche with better catchy adcopy than yours.

Click to expand...

Well, I'd say competition is fierce, but basically because we do sell game accounts. Since, there are a lot of kids in this market and people fighting over every penny they can get, I assumed we could have been hit by fake clicks, but probably isn't the case.
We've already been targeted a lot, cause our buyer base is ever increasing and we've seen a lot of attacks during the sites existence. That's why I assumed bot/script clicks could play a factor.

Nut-Nights said:

What a dramatic title If you are not seeing any chargebacks, you are good to go.

Click to expand...

Dramatic yes, but only due to the fact that Cost/Conversion went up from 5 times and more in a short period of time. At least I consider that exploding^^
What do you actually mean with, if we see no Chargebacks? You mean customer Chargebacks?


Overall, we've now raised a ticket with the google support to gain some insights here.
Will see what they might have to say on it.

CarpeDiem87 said:

Actually cost per click went up a lot and Cost/Conversion is now at five times it was before.

Click to expand...

There's the answer then. If you cost per click goes up, and your conversion rate stays the same or falls, then your cost per conversion will obviously increase a lot as well.

InstagramDude said:

There's the answer then. If you cost per click goes up, and your conversion rate stays the same or falls, then your cost per conversion will obviously increase a lot as well.

Click to expand...

Of course, just have no clue why it went up that much when we did nothing special. I mean it was at around 0.3 - 0.5 per click a week ago still and now is at roughly 3.0 per click.
Maybe it is simply Google picking up the frontpage changes and the algo has to adopt to it first. No idea.

CarpeDiem87 said:

Of course, just have no clue why it went up that much when we did nothing special. I mean it was at around 0.3 - 0.5 per click a week ago still and now is at roughly 3.0 per click.
Maybe it is simply Google picking up the frontpage changes and the algo has to adopt to it first. No idea.

Click to expand...

Can be many things. Especially if the keywords doesn't have super much traffic. If you competitors increased their budgets and their bidding size it can easily go up.