TrafficEstimatorService - Results seem to be WAY off from existing adgroup history

[Steven Hong]

Anyone please help!

We have begun experimenting with the TrafficEstimatorService. When given an existing campaign, adgroup and corresponding keywords - the forecasted estimates seem to be way off from historic averages. I understand that forecasts will necessarily be a little different than history - but these differences are too large to be explained by simple volatility.

We call the estimator passing in an existing campaign ID, existing adgroup ID all the existing keywords in that adgroup with their match types, and with the existing adgroup max CPC (we don't set keyword max CPCs in our account).

We do not set criterion, budget or networksetting as we would like to use the settings of the existing campaign and adgroup in our account.

We believe that the results returned should at least be in the same order of magnitude of the recent history of the adgroup since we are using the same Max CPC. This is not the case.

For example, if we average all the min / max estimates at the platform level and total them up (tablet, mobile, desktop), we might get a total cost per day of $0.68.  Where in reality the total cost per day is averaging $18.00. These aren't in the same ballpark. 

Question 1: Why are the numbers so different?

In addition, this particular adgroup has a bid modifier of tablet -100%.  So no tablet traffic should ever see this adgroup. However the estimator says that some traffic will see it and click on it.

Question 2: Does the traffic estimator ignore bid mofifiers in the adgroup settings?

[Shwetha Vastrad (AdWords API Team)]

Hi Steve,

Could you send over the SOAP request and response logs for this request to TrafficEstimatorService? If you have set the platformEstimateRequested field to true, then the campaign level estimates will be segmented by platform. The traffic estimates will depend on the bid set in the request. There could be a number of reasons why the traffic forecasts may be different than your actual results as described in this guide. Once I have the logs, I'll be able to dig deeper. Please use Reply privately to author when responding. 

Thanks,

Shwetha, AdWords API Team.