11
Apr
06

Questionable Reliability of Google AdWords Metrics

By Joshua Steimle 3 Comments Categories: Marketing

If you use Google’s AdWords for pay-per-click advertising on Google you might have questioned the validity of the numbers AdWords gives you, like I have. Today I saw something, once again, that I find hard to believe and which causes me question whether AdWords is entirely accurate.


As I login to my AdWords account today I see that there have been 182 searches so far (at 4pm) for “utah website design.” First of all, I find it hard to believe there have been that many searches for those keywords today. Especially since there have only been 16 searches for “utah web design” which usually has more searches. And if anything, you would assume that those two keyword combinations would be closer to each other than 182 vs. 16.

Second, yesterday there were not nearly so many searches for the same keywords. Unfortunately I didn’t have my ads running all day so I don’t have an exact number of impressions, but suffice it to say I can tell it was much less.

Third, although my average position is 1.1 for “utah website design” and there have been 182 impressions, I haven’t received a single click. Also unusual.

It almost appears as though some bot was searching for that keyword today but not clicking on anything, or at least not on my link. Either that, or Google has some funky data for some reason.

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  • http://www.russpage.net Russell Page

    Any chance google is manipulating the system to charge more for ads?

  • http://www.mwi.com Joshua Steimle

    It seems highly unlikely. If they were it wouldn’t be hard for evidence of it to get out and that kind of thing could cost them billions. It’s in their best interests for everything to be accurate. Plus they don’t get paid anything for impressions, only for clicks, and I’m not getting any clicks which is what is so weird. However, I still have no idea what’s going on.

    Today there have been 128 impressions so far with zero clicks. I’m wondering if there’s just a bug somewhere in their system somewhere.

  • http://www.searchtrends.org Dave Bascom

    There’s no way Google is manipulating the system. I think Josh’s guess about some kind of auto search bot is much more likely. It could be someone using Web Position or similar software to check their site’s ranking, or someone screen-scaping, or I’ve even heard rumors of people doing this type of thing to screw with competitors’ click through rates while their own ads are paused, but who knows? One thing I’m fairly certain of is that it’s not due to a sudden interest in “utah website design” especially since you didn’t get a single click from all those searches.

    I see weird numbers like this much more often from Yahoo than Google, but a lot of times the Yahoo numbers include a bunch of useless (non-converting) clicks as well. Whenever I call Yahoo on it, they look into it and come back to say, “oh, no, they’re legitimate clicks.” But usually end up refunding part of it as a “courtesy.” Consider yourself lucky that none of those nasty little bots clicked on your ads.