Almost 50% Drop in Impressions AdWords Week Three

I would not have believed this if I did not manage so many accounts, but in week three of June, that is 6/15 to 6/21, nearly all businesses (nearly 40 AdWords accounts) crashed in regards to the number of impressions on Google AdWords. In fact, the problem has impacted so many accounts in such a big way that June is sure to be considered a poor month when tracking results in the long run.

When reviewing the statistical data of a conglomeration of accounts, impressions and also clicks dropped from a whooping 75% on some accounts to 15% on others with an average decrease expected by month end of around 20% to 33%. Google will really have to serve ads strongly this next week in order to pocket their full 30 day click budget.

As a result we have started to see some accounts be served way, way, over their daily budget, even more than the stated and authorized 10% over per day by Google to make up for the third week’s loss. One account we manage with a $9 a day click budget yesterday had a $20 spend. According to Google’s policies, they can only spend 10% more than the daily budget in a period of several days, but with really bad results in traffic this last week, I am sure that we will see particularly strong impression and click activity to help Google end the month back on schedule.

Firefox Bane or Boom

Just two years ago Internet Explorer owned the Web, now Firefox owns nearly 20% of the market. If you haven’t looked at your older website with Firefox, you really need to take a peak.

If you are not testing your website in Firefox you really must be. In fact here is my list of browsers that I routinely test on:

Internet Explorer 7

Thinking about web design.Internet Explorer 6 – actually more people have 6 than 7 so make sure your site looks good in both

Firefox

Opera – but marginally here I still look, but don’t majorly stress out over incompatibilities as Opera is a nice browser but still used minimally in the marketplace.

The big difference between each browser is how they interpret the box model. In layman’s terms this translates into crazy spacing and padding and margins around important design elements. Sometimes the difference is so big, that you simply have to choose the least terrible approach. You will simply never get your site to look identical in all browser types and versions.

Typically I will identify what the client is using and make sure that it looks good in their flavor and version and them make sure it looks good in IE 7 and Firefox and not terrible in IE 6 and Opera.