Need Help Regarding My Adwords Account

[skincareguy]

Hi Everyone:

Need your Google expertise here please...

I have a e-com site that does rather well in sales, traffic, etc. We are one of the larger stores in the Health & Beauty market. We, like everyone else, advertise on Adwords, Overture, kanoodle, looksmart, etc etc. For the most part we are pleased with the conversions on Google and Yahoo. About a week ago though, our sales dropped about 30% on a daily basis. Being rather obsessed with these things, as all of us are, alarm bells started going off in my head.

So I spent day and night trying to figure out what might be happening and here is what I found, and I think it is very bizarre. On the google network, everyday at approximately 2:00 p.m. EST our ads disappear from the network. Before anyone mentions daily budgets, etc. I am talking about ads we have at #1, that are at 10% of their daily budget, just simply disappearing - or I should say NOT appearing. This will last until approximately 5:30 p.m. when magically, our ads start to resume their spots at #1 or #2.

Here it gets stranger, everyday when our ads disappear, the same competitor will take over our spot, and the same advertisers land in spots #2, #3, etc, but only for that timeframe and then we end up in our usual spot.

To make it even more bizarre, we have another completely unrelated website that has its own account with Google and uses some of the same keywords for its own ads. The same thing happens to that sites ads at the same time.

When I spoke to Google today, the frontline people avoided commenting on this at all and very quickly said that they have escalated the matter to the Technology Group and someone would get back to me (hasn't happened yet)

This happens to be our absolute peak time of day for sales and is really hurting our business. Any thoughts? Comments? Help? Anyone with the same experience?

I really appreciate any feedback you can give me!

B-T-W the website is http://www.SpaSkin.com

[dburdon]

Skin,

1. Are you sure you have the right budget?
2. Are you online when this event happens?
3. Try upping your budget precisely as this event occurs.

[dburdon]

Skin,

as a contingency buy space on Overture (Yahoo in the US?).

[skincareguy]

Hi dburdon:

Thanks for the reply. Yes, today our main keyword had approximately $50.00 in usage against a $400 daily budget. So I don't think that's the problem. I am on-line when this happens, then go to different machines on different ip addresses to verify that it is happening on the google network not anywhere else.