What do you do when the total clicks is bigger than the sum of the clicks attributed to each keyword?
In Google Adwords it happens, at least, it happened to me. It seems like only yesterday when I saw a video where a guy was boldly saying that Google Adwords was the best investment anyone could make in their business. How can I understand paying for Adwords – without seeing which keywords people clicked on – and avoid thinking its a great investment in Google’s business rather than my own?
So, to answer that question I asked another one . I posted it to the new guy forum that Google maintains to keep newbies from admitting publicly that some aspects of Google’s services are not immediately intuitive.
I wrote:
My keyword clicks are way lower than my total clicks
I foolishly asked my boss why the total clicks were higher than the sum of the clicks on all keywords. Now he wants to know too. I found that the total of the detail clicks equaled the total of all Search clicks – leaving the Display clicks to account for the discrepancy. I’m pretty sure that someone has solved this before but if there’s a discussion about it I didn’t describe my problem in the same terms.
I’m the new guy and I get a break, but I’d like to get up to speed. Thanks for your time.
About an hour later someone had taken on my question and said:
Hi Steve,
Sounds like you’re running a hybrid campaign of both search and display. Clicks from the display network do not get attributed to any keyword, so total number of clicks on keywords will not add up the total number of clicks. Add the number of display network clicks to the total of keyword clicks and you should come up with the same number.
This is only one reason most of us will recommend splitting your search and display campaigns into separate campaigns. There are other good reasons for doing this.
Best of Luck!
Pete
petebardo — Deadhead doing AdWords
The diagnosis fit the symptoms and I was so pleased to have a direction to go in that I didn’t consider that Pete might be wrong. (Can you really trust a Deadhead doing Adwords?) I immediately changed my hybrid campaign to search only and began looking for explanation in Google’s documentation.
Google links to Learn more about campaign types, right from the settings page for each campaign in Google Adwords. It tells you more than you can absorb in one go about the ins-n-outs of your choice of campaign. It recommends a ‘hybrid’ campaign for newer Adwords customers and I didn’t see a warning about not counting clicks by keyword in the display ads. We’ll see what the results of my moving away from the recommended practice are in a day or two.
Today I learned:
- that asking for help can be a Good Thing and
- that display campaigns don’t emphasize keywords like search campaigns.