Google Ad Numbers Don’t Add Up
I paid Google for 222 clicks but can only reconcile 77 of them. I asked for delivery to United States only and they did not seem to honor that. Turned off the ad campaign for now.
I’ve turned off almost all of my Google ads because the numbers don’t make any sense. Most keywords require ridiculously high bids even though test searches show that they aren’t actually being bid up. Google’s technical support was no help.
Previously:
Good to know Google has not changed since I pulled my ads in 2010.
I was paying high for project management clicks and increasingly restricted distribution from "all" to just google properties to just search page; restricted to specific countries; then restricted specific search terms.
I found that google was still allowing clicks from Iran and other countries not on my allowed list.
I cross checked clicks vs. my server logs and found that most clicks were "fake"- only about 1 out of 50 looked at more than the landing page. (Maybe the product had no interest I suppose).
Backtracking (before I removed blogs from my ad spend) google had placed my ad on blogs that had nothing to do with project management, and the clicks were all from poor countries.
I am "lucky" that I had few visitors per day so I could hand-track natural visits vs. ad clicks. If you have thousands of visitors per day it will be very difficult to measure successful clicks. (Successful, in my estimation, is an interested user- she does not have to buy but does actually look at your product).