From feedback I'm reading the board it looks like it will be known as "Black December"
The Adwords that many of us have done well with for a while now has changed and all signs lead to it getting worse for advertisers.
With Google changing the rules and adding new "features" every few weeks it is no wonder.
The nail in the coffin is the new Quality Score for landing pages......which was not even made known except for the Blog page.
Excuse me? Now you are telling that I can pay for a click but I also have to SEO my landing pages?
I'm sorry but high converting sales page is usually not SEO'ed....
Am I up in the night? Is anyone out there doing BETTER these last few weeks?
With Hundreds of thousands of dollars invested with Google this is a major slap in the face. Sorry Google but this is not a good way to treat your advertisers.
You can only get so many golden eggs from the goose……. Well you know the story.
heyday
Allowing price control on 'inactive' keywords was IMHO the best rule change of the year - which was dramatically for the better.
Our spend is now 50% of what it was 2 months ago and our bricks & mortar business is running at 95% capacity.
Our AdSense results are also improving month by month which means that we make a nice profit on the difference between AdWords spend and AdSense income. Prior to March it was all out of pocket.
Another improvement is the increase in EPC from AdSense which I directly attribute to the lessening of MFA type sites showing up on AdSense.
I realize that things can change in a heartbeat however for now I am delighted.
We've had great results at much lower costs as AW made us abandon some high volume key words by pricing them out of a profitable range.
Our spend is now 50% of what it was 2 months ago
So, let me understand here, you're happy because you have less traffic and are spending less money with AdWords?
In other words, you're happy because you're doing *less* business with AdWords.
Perhaps I misread...but I thought they said they were spending less and selling more...
Freq---
I guess I just wanted to highlight the fact that they're happy doing less business with AdWords the company. Not so much over all.
I just find it ironic.
So, let me understand here, you're happy because you have less traffic and are spending less money with AdWords?In other words, you're happy because you're doing *less* business with AdWords.
That's exactly what I mean. With our type of business it's very hard to track results because everything is done by e-mail and people find us in many different ways.
We have been with GoTo (now Overture / Yahoo) and AdWords from the very beginning and as we have added key words and prices have gone up our budget went up some 300%. We didn't mind because our B&M business was also running at capacity.
I began to wonder if the amount we were spending was really necessary to maintain the business we were doing although I was hesitant to touch the programs as everything was going so well.
As Overture starting messing with what they considered search I reduced that part and added it to AdWords.
Some words I added no doubt brought us business however we got into a situation where were were turning away guests as we were full months in advance.
I added AdSense in March and it was a huge success with increases each month which exceeded our AdWords spend.
Then AW introduced their new rules and we lost two keywords which were of a very general nature and brought us many clicks. The price for these keywords has gone from 5˘ each to 20˘. We went to 15˘ but I won't go higher.
The loss of these clicks has had an impact on the total visitors to our site but NO impact on AdSense revenues or our B&M business which is still full.
Bottom line is I probably never needed these keywords in the first place and now our AW budget is half of what it was and our AS revenue is up 30% in the last two months.
So, yes, I'm smiling :-)
However, one of my clients got zapped BIGTIME on a credit card issue, and they're steaming over and I'm steaming over it. They got notified on the 12th that their credit card had been declined, so they IMMEDIATELY put in a backup card number, which seemed to be okay, and the ads started running again. Then on the 13th, they went off, and they've stayed off until this morning, when, fed up after trying to get someone's attention on this, I finally just re-entered the original credit card number - for about the fourth time - and it finally took off again. There was nothing wrong with the second card, it was never declined, and the My Account tab shows that everything was charged on the proper dates without any hitch, yet - no traffic whatsoever for a solid week before Christmas, no answer to emails and no answer to repeated phone calls. They're back up today, but it's too late for the Christmas sales (this is a high volume sporting goods site) My client is positively fit to be tied - they tell me this will be their worst Christmas season ever, and they were on track to have the best. So yea, for them this is Black December indeed.
I added a new, clean card with a huge limit. It was immediately charged, the bank confirmed. Ads showed for about an hour and then were down for the next 12 hours.
Never got a good explanation.
Israel
This is ESSENTIAL business planning. If your card hits the limit, you weren't paying attention. Why would you risk having your ads shut off?
Just make extra payments to the card, or use a debit card.
Moreover, in the case of the client above - there WAS no actual declined charge, according to the bank.
In fact, I caught this within 3 hours and was told by the secondary bank card issuer that Google had successfully charged the backup card. Then for reasons unknown, when Google made a second charge to the still wide-open backup card, Google made a dozen $1.00 pre-authorizations to the card to see that it was a valid #, name, etc (they only need to do one).
This caused the bank holding the backup card to put a "hold" on it for suspicious activity, so any subsequent purchase I made on-line were not processed (this included holiday gifts that had to be repurchased in brick and mortar stores).
The on-line purchases went through fine at POS but the "hold" status prevented settlement before the holiday. After the bank had assured me all was fine with Google charges with the backup card, this nonsense happened. I again called the bank and asked the bank why they didn't contact me about this alleged "questionable" activity and they said I was "queued" for a call (3 days later). By this time, luckily, AdWords had successfully moved me back to the primary card which was now paid down.
To the poster who said there is "no excuse" for my lapse, I do strive for perfection, but I'll be the first to admit I sometimes fall short.
It may cost me once in a while, but I consider it more virtuous to own up to mistakes rather than claim I can attain perfection.
Judging by this whole comedy of errors, I appear to belong to a large group ;)
And I got the little PC Travel Kit yesterday, so I'll just move on with no regrets.
Israel
