Strange Response From Google

I have been working on improving my PPC campaigns (DIYSolarPanels and MakeSolarPanels).  In looking at the stats for where the clicks were coming from, the majority of them were coming from outside the United States (I had placed the ads in most of the major English-speaking countries).  I was getting good CTRs and decent hop ratios but no conversions.  So, I said, what could be wrong here.

One of the first thoughts would be that the Landing Pages weren’t working well and they were sending lots of poorly qualified traffic to the sales page.  However, when looking at some comparisons, they looked to be in good shape.  Plus, one of them was one that has provided good conversions previously.  So that was probably not the issue.

So, where do I go next?  I thought to myself, is there a potential that the impressions and clicks from outside the US were not providing the potential conversions that I was looking for.  From my stats, it was looking like about 60% of my traffic was outside the US and I didn’t really want to lose that traffic but if it wasn’t converting, then I didn’t want to be paying for it either.

So, I cut off everything except the United States and Canada.  Now, this is where things get a little strange.

After I made the change, my number of impressions per day has been dropping (down by 1/3 and continuing to drop) but more importantly, the CTR dropped from ~3.2% to 0.22%.  It has recovered a little bit today but still not up where it was.  So what caused such a drastic drop in CTR?

A little research has led me to a very interesting little bit of analysis.  What I have found is that I have a definite correlation between position and CTR.  Here are the results that I found over that few day period:

Graph of Average Position versus Click-Through-Rate

So, what this is telling me is that there is a strong correlation between “Average Position” and “Click-Through-Rate” but the sensitivity is a lot higher than I expected.  With a change in position from 4.4 to 5.9, the CTR has gone from 5% to 0.2%.  That’s huge but a very, very critical piece of information.  I am going to be adjusting the numbers so that I get my position higher and see where that takes me.

Good clicks to all!