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?

[netmeg]

Yea, but are you actually PAYING that for a click, or anywhere close to that? When they first started doing the quality score thing, I had a bunch of words go to $5.00 all of a sudden. I raised them all up, and with a few exceptions, I never paid more than a few cents more than I was paying before. I just (apparently) had to tell Google that I was *willing* to pay that much. It's a stupid game, I admit, but within a week or ten days, everything pretty much was back to normal, and as long as I keep my pages relevant, I rarely see a word go inactive now.

[jim2003]

My personal experience is that sometimes I end up paying the min cpc and sometimes the cost goes up to less than the min cpc. Very confusing.

[aleksl]

The thing that I am trying to get across here is neither "yeah, some keywords went up", nor even "my ads stayed the same because we have quality".

I am trying to get across this:

Unless there was some other big stats aquisition, but I am sure it would've been all over the news, there's only one way G$$gle could collect conversion data. It is through G$$gle ANALytics.

So jacking up the prices is caused by "free" G$$gle conversion tracking (a.k.a. ANALytics). It is AS DECEIVING AS IT GETS.

Even Microsoft doesn't act this way.

[bradical]

Ok,

So, I'm addressing this officially to anyone with an official response.

I am a highest-tier Adwords customer. I spend $60k per month and have had the exact same campaigns running now for 2 years with 10s of thousands of keywords.

In the last few days, many thousands of my long-running, most successful, high CTR keywords have been disabled. These are keywords that had above a 2% click through rate in many cases. These are keywords that converted very well for me (isnt that the true measure of 'Quality')? We're not talking about low CTR, irrelevant keywords, but highly targeted, long-standing, proven keywords.

Google has disabled these keywords and is asking $1- $10 to reactivate them. These keywords averaged a CPC of $.20 before this. At a $1 CPC, I'd be losing money.

I have spent millions of dollars with Google Adwords over the past few years. Are they now telling me that they don't want my money? Because I will not be re-activating these keywords at the bids they want.

If this is not reversed, I will be forced to shut down my account, and my business. I am very very angry about this change.

Can we get an official GOOGLE response on this immediately? If this is related to quality score, then there's a problem in the quality score algo. FIX IT DAMMIT.

[Atomic]

So jacking up the prices is caused by "free" G$$gle conversion tracking (a.k.a. ANALytics). It is AS DECEIVING AS IT GETS.

I don't use Google Analytics and I was hit by this. I've never used it and I probably never will. So how do I fit into this?

I would like to add that the landing pages that have seen the least impact by whatever Google did have the most incoming links. There is one page with some great incoming links that was hit hard but it is no longer in the index for some reason.

Perhaps it will come back after Google brings the index back from its rollback.

[Wlauzon]

And I think that there is a bssic fallacy here.

Yes, I said FALLACY - as in not true, fake, false assumption, Roswell, UFO's, tin hats...

Google does NOT set the prices. Keyword prices are an AUCTION.

If a keyword goes from .20 to .90, it was NOT Google that raised the price - it was all of those bidding against you for position that raised the price.

Now, there might be some odd and/or nefarious reasons for THAT happening, but it is not the Evil Google Demon that is conspiring against you.

And for the record, just in the past few days I have seen some rediculous keyword bids in Yahoo Search Marketing also... bids go like (low to high): .10.10.10.12.18 3.00...

So basically someone (or some ad bot) is bidding keywords up for some reason. It might be Ad manager software gone mad, clueless fake SEO's that guarantee ad position, or a combination of many things.

But it ain't Google.

[ConfusedWriter]

That's probably the smartest thing I've heard yet.

Here's what I think: The majority of G's Adwords customers are probably the small time operators, like myself. Those that spend 10k/month or above are probably in the 10% or less range. (just a guestimate)

So, with the conspiracy theories running amok, this means that Google is knocking all of the small time players out, on purpose; they are willing to lose 90% of their customer base b/c they want more money (all based on Google Analytics).

[bradical]

If a keyword goes from .20 to .90, it was NOT Google that raised the price - it was all of those bidding against you for position that raised the price.

Not true in this case. Yes, of course Adwords prices and position are set by a combination of your CPC bid and your CTR. However, in this case, we're talking about something different. Google disabling high performing keywords that were showing in a high position, then asking for a minimum CPC 500% higher than the former CPC.

This is not a case of competition bidding up keywords. This is a case of some algorithm setting ridiculously high minimum CPCs, seemingly randomly.

[Martin40]

I did notice an increase in CPC simultaneously with a decrease in organic traffic, but if prices rise from $1 to $10 then there's obviously something else going on and it's not a bot because bots are good patriots, but they don't have Adwords accounts.

[bostonseo]

bradical I suggest you say everything you wrote here to your account manager - posting it here helps you vent, but nothing is going to come of it.

I'm sure some Google employees monitor these boards, but they are not in a position to take corrective action. They also can't comment on what is really going on.

Call up your account manager and #*$!; I bet they'll say something to the effect of 'oh, this is the first I'm hearing about this'. Google ALWAYS tries to put a positive spin on everything.