Sorry if this has already been covered. I noticed a strange adwords behavior today for the first time and wanted to see if anyone else is experiencing the same.

Campaign was crusing along with a $250 daily budget. Was getting about 7-9% CTR's on my strong keywords. Daily budget was being spread out over the entire 24 hour period of the day.

Today however, daily budget hits after just 12 hours, add campaign stops (this being contrary to their published documentation indicating campaigns under the recommended daily will be spread out over the course of a day). Ok, thats just the first red flag for the day. Closer inspection shows that CTR's that were in the 7-9% range, are now all in the 25-40% range. Now I'm thinking, eithere a) i've stumbled onto the holy grail of key word advertising or (more likely) b) somethings up with adwords. So after much research, I manage to find a real phone number for google adwords support, call, and am repeatedly told that this is not a concern and that this is the way it should work. (3 people, including a 2nd level manager tell me this). Ok, so I add $50 to todays daily budget to see what happens, and get the same result, a burst of activity followed by nothing else after i tap the budget. However this time, instead of stopping at the $300 daily budget, adwords decides it wants to keep going until it hits $450.

And, I might as well add that the other difference today is that while getting the same number of CTR's the impressions it takes to get them is a third of what have normally been the trend. Looking through our logs and doing traceroutes on "all" the CT's comming from google doesnt really turn up any evidence of fradulent clicks...so I'm not leaning there yet.

The frustrating part of this whole ordeal is that no one at google thinks all of these differences represents anything other than normal activity --when in fact the "numbers" show quite the opposite.

Anyone else been down this road?

Norm

What times (include time zone) are you getting these clicks, I'm in EST, and I get almost all of my clicks between 2:00pm and 9:30pmEST

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