A major change happened on 18th Feb in AdWords world. Google stopped showing side ads completely. At the same time, the number of top ads was increased from 3 to 4. The number of ad slots at the bottom of the search result page were also increased, though the efficacy of the bottom ads is yet to be ascertained.
Last week, we published an AdWords script to identify keywords under threat. This script was very well received. We privately received many messages appreciating the effort put in this script.
This topic occupied the top mindshare of PPC community for most of the last week. Some analysis with data, a lot of advice about how to tackle this change and even some interesting hypotheses about whys of this change was discussed last week.
As the change was rolled out on a Friday, finding the impact of this change immediately was slightly tough. Most accounts follow a certain weekly pattern which makes it hard to locate the impact of change in a short duration. Now that one full week, from Monday to Sunday is complete since the change, it is easy to find out the impact of this change.
The week starting 22nd February and ending on 28th February is one full week with this update. (You can consider the week from 21st to 27th Feb, if you wish.) Comparing the last week’s performance (22nd to 28th Feb, 2016) to the previous week (15th to 21st Feb, 2016) will provide a glimpse of how things have changed for you. As Google’s change was done on Friday, with changes rolling out over a next couple of days, it may be possible the impact for your account started earlier the range we are comparing. Yet, we believe, it is useful to get this data to understand the direction of the change.
We have created another script that will help you quickly identify any performance problems with your AdWords account.
This AdWords script will find out the keywords that have lost most of the clicks in the last week compared the previous week. The keywords losing most clicks in the last week will be listed at the top. We believe, these are the keywords that lost significant traffic from the side positions. Of course, there could be other changes you may have done to the account (for example, lowering bids for a keywords with poor CPA). But, as the PPC manager, you will be in a position to attribute the cause to each of the change in traffic.
Go head, grab this AdWords script to check the impact of side ad changes and see how your AdWords accounts have fared. You may need to go through our earlier post to know how to make changes to this script before you run. If there are accounts that have been impacted, it would be a good idea to get a thorough report with our earlier script and see if any keywords need immediate attention.
In case of any queries regarding the script, feel free to write to me at shashi at karooya.com.
Related Articles:
Stop the wasted ad spend. Get more conversions from the same ad budget.
Our customers save over $16 Million per year on Google and Amazon Ads.