Possible Google Campaign Editor Hiccup
In the last ten days or so my colleagues and I have noticed something odd when we work with our Google pay per click accounts. It appears that under certain circumstances, Google’s campaign editor will attempt to set an account’s content network delivery settings to “only the placements I target” without your knowledge, and in some instances it has disabled the content network altogether.
In my day job I am often called upon to audit performance of an Adwords account compared with the changes the account manager has been making. For this, I utilize the Change History tool extensively. During these audits lately I have seen what I thought was a highly unusual number of placement targeting changes. When I would look at the current campaigns, the content network was not even active, so I thought whatever placement targeting experiment that account manager was running must not have succeeded.
Today, however, I saw something odd happen in an account I manage myself. I selected three campaigns from the campaign summary screen by checking off the little check boxes and clicking the link to edit settings. In the campaign setting page I reviewed all the settings, decided that all I needed to do what re-balance the budget a little on two of the campaigns, and then I changed ad rotation to Optimized instead of Rotate Evenly because I was through testing ads for exposure. I then saved my adjustment.
I wanted to review some changes I had made the previous week but didn’t remember which ad group I needed to look in so I loaded up the change history, set the date to go back two weeks and was astonished to see this:
Notice the change to the content network work placement – I never made any changes other than the budget and the Ad serving – these two campaigns don’t even use the content network – I keep all my content network campaigns separate from search network campaigns.
When I noticed this I sent a note to some of my colleagues who replied back that yes, they’d seen something similar happen in the last week or so but in most cases it was more severe in that it actually turned OFF the content network altogether on certain “mixed” campaigns that were running on both search and content at the same time. {Editor’s note: I will write on why your content and search campaigns should be kept separate in a future post!}
So I decided to test it again. Using the Campaign Summary page as my starting point, I selected three campaigns – two were content network only campaigns and the other was a search network only campaign. I edited ONE budget on one of the content network campaigns and touched nothing on the other two campaigns I had selected. When I checked the change history, I saw this:
I went to another account altogether and could not recreate this anomaly, but I was able to do it at will within this account, as was one of my colleagues in two of his accounts where he had noticed the content network being turned off without his intending to turn it off.
We reported this anomaly to our dedicated team at Google but as of the end of business today (Friday, Sep 5) we have no reply. We have only been able to recreate it when we select campaigns from the campaign summary page of an account – when we drill down into an account before editing the campaign settings, we are not seeing this happen.
Beware – check your content network settings to make sure you’re not inadvertently disabling the content network.
Sorry, ouija has no special extra insight.
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