Sudden increase of CPC recently?

My campaigns are full of inactive keywords.

[fischermx]

I didn't review my campaigns since last week, I remember a campaign with arround 1000 keyword in which I had about 150 "inactive for search".
Today I have 750 "inactive for search"!

Does anybody get any similar to this recently?

[etr06]

Wow, that's all interesting feedback... To be clear, while most of my bids are 10x less than the April 5th extravaganza, they're still 5x more than they used to be (and I've not done anything to touch them).

A 500% increase still renders the vast majority of my bids inactive, so I'm still completely SOL right now. I was hoping the rest of the weekend would see numbers returning to pre-April 5th levels, but no such luck as yet.

I'll continue to appeal to the AdWords team until I get some constructive feedback from them as to what they suddenly think I've done wrong. It's hard to sit here and guess what it is that they seemingly arbitrarily decided wasn't up to their standards when nothing on my site has changed.

Has ANYONE seen their bids return to PRE-April 5th levels?

[koncept]

I'd say that my account is pretty much back to normal. I had cleaned out all the inactive keywords on friday and then when things looked normal again yesterday I added them all back. It was pretty tedious work going into my change history to find all the keywords I had deleted and then getting them all back into their proper adgroups. There are only a few keywords that are still elevated, but I can deal.

Glad things are back to somewhat normal (for me) but what a wake up call! Basically, my whole livlihood is at the mercy of Google it seems. I always knew that but when I had to come face to face with it... well, it's scary isn't it? Time to diversify.

[kempozone]

Update: I finally got a response from my rep. After reviewing my campaign with technicians they have found no errors in their system and goes on to explain in, what seems like 10 pages, about the quality score and relevancy of ads, that their action is to protect the integrity of their system to provide users with useful experience, yadi, yadi, yadi...

... a few hours later everything went back to normal as if nothing happened.

Why won't they just admit a mistake was made and that in a few hours everything will be back to normal?

kz

[etr06]

At this point, I don't need admissions, apologies, reparations or credits. Those would all be wonderful, but right now, all I really need is to have the experience you did where everything magically goes back to pre-April 5th levels.

Thanks so much for the update! Hopefully the rest of us will be able to report back just as successfully, and soon.

[Abigail]

OK, I just tried to add them back in again and they went in as $1.24 not the $12.59 but that is not pre Apr 5 it is still pretty much 400% increase over the original. And that is only one set, all mine were affected in the same manner. Still far too nasty.

[daras]

Hi,
I just joined this forum as I am experiencing the same problem as everybody else.

Although, mine didnt start on the 5th, it only happened on the 8th when I noticed my traffic about 1/2 what it normally is I checked my campaign and noticed all the inactives.

Can somebody who's account appears to be back to normal try to add the following keyword to a campaign:

aafdlllldkdkkkiff

Wondering whether you can bid less than .10c for it?

When I add this as a keyword it asks me to raise my minimum to 10c. Now I know .10c doesnt sound like much, but I used to bid only 5c for all of my keywords, yet now about 60% of them are inactive asking me to raise up to 10-40 cents in most cases.

Look forward to hearing further comments.

Thanks

[webpublisher]

Abigail & daras are you an affiliate like me? This problem seems to hit affiliates and merchants but I'm guessing more affiliates.

[tsinoy]

I think this is a test on their part to see if advertisers will increase their bids or not. like most of us doing testing.. if it all goes bad.. just reset it back to the original numbers... I'm sure some advertisers are willing to increase their bids since competition is out of the way at the moment and conversions would be really nice...

by the way.. I'm still seeing $5/$10 minimum bids in my account.. been running my account for a year...

[Elric99]

Hello everyone

Just wanted to echo what's already been reported here. While it's been a frustrating time, it's good to see that it's not just me.

From around April the 5th, I've seen many successful campaigns destroyed by $5 to $10 minimum CPC on some phrases.

I looked through my account to try to find the reason. There doesn't seem to be any logic behind it. That's the frustrating part. There's nothing you can improve, do or tweak.

If it stays this way, the only thing I can say about Adwords would be 'you can only bid on certain phrases'. Some phrases are, for an unknown reason, out of reach due to the high bids.

[hdpt00]

One answer: short GOOG, they need to beat the street and can't so they resort to this crap.