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Comment by andyferris | Hacker News Reader

> which meant it would be very costly/impossible to get CTR back to a reasonable level

Sorry - is there some kind of hysteresis? You can't revert the setting and get back to exactly where you started?

Once you have thousands of ad impressions with very few clicks, it takes thousands of new impressions at a very high CTR to get your overall account's CTR back to something reasonable. And now that your cost per click has skyrocketed, even if you can get a high CTR for the new impressions your cost has skyrocketed.

That’s a sampling bias. You are confusing how your metrics are affected by the adverse event with how your metrics are now.

No confusion. I've been through this with several accounts I helped manage. Once an account has a history of low CTR the CPC goes up. Starting a new campaign doesn't help; the CPC stays high until you can get the CTR back up. And that costs dearly.

But again, that was years ago. Things may have changed.

So there's no way to set over which period the metrics are calculated?

Or is it a thing where the client only cares about the default metrics calculated over the full history of an account?

It’s on Google’s end. “I have inventory (a placement) to sell to an advertiser. I can sell it to X with a CTR of (10% or 1%) and a CPC of $0.50 or to Y with a CTR of 3% and a CPC of $1.”

Whether X’s CTR is 10% (what it used to be) or 1% (what it is now) drives the decision of which ad is better to serve in that inventory slot.

Unfortunately, things have not changed. You are 100% correct. If anything, things have gotten worse, because now we have even fewer options to manage accounts.

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