At least this time Google is giving a heads up.
I very happy to hear all the MFA people suffering
That's just it. I havn't heard of many MFA sites suffering. Affiliate sites, badly designed merchant sites are who I have seen get affected. My sites had adsense but I made very little from the adsense and they certainly had them in less prominate locations than a few big players I could mention. I really was using them in the manner they were intended, which was as an alternative if the product I put forward to the visitor was not satisfactory. And my pages always led to the product they were looking for.
This is an image thing. I firmly believe that this is about G "keeping up appearances" and only putting forward sites that look good.
If they were really concerned about overall quality, they would move it out to the content side, which would affect most of the MFA sites.
This is an incorrect and totally misinformed statement. I run an ecommerce site and my primary keyword CPC is now up 400%. I sell cheap widgets and cannot afford this new CPC. So what do I do now?
Google tells me, improve my landing page quality. What crap! My ad perfectly describes my website and I have no interest in encouraging poor quality clicks.
It seems the new algo is totally flawed and ill conceived. When G finds its revenues falling drastically, they will revert to old. So I do nothing for the next few days and watch.
Anyone seeing much action over this? I have not noticed much change anywhere.
As a publisher, I've noticed a definite improvement in clickthrough rates in the past couple of days. CTR is the highest it's been in a long, long time. Could be a coincidence, of course.
Granted, I wasn't spending my own money, but for clients, but if it happened to me, I'd okay A FEW of the higher CPC terms, and watch very carefully to see if I was actually getting charged the full amount, and whether or not it came back down over time. I realize it costs money, but how much would you lose if you didn't advertise at all?
From my own experience, it looks to me as if that if your pages ARE relevant, and you maintain a high CTR on that keyword, your CPC *does* actually fall back down.
Now, whether or not Google should be playing games this way is a whole nother question, and one that should be addressed, but if you are suffering from having your ads go inactive, you probably want to pay more attention to that first.
but no doubt it will become 7 pages....
negative traffic effects already start to show clearly at
this hour..
It really looks they randomly killed many of our best keywords/landingpages, average CTR suffering cause plenty
really not so well performing ads are left active.. I hope
they will still tweak this landing page quality factor.. since
it's clearly broken now.
Yes, this is an interesting point. Poor performing keywords are still active. Only the best performing ones have been knocked out!
This thread is 7 pages long but I can only get 3. I would love to read the rest is there anyway to do that?
I think they recently (this past weekend maybe?) had a software upgrade here on WWW and there's still a few bugs in the system, including the page count. I read something about it somewhere - maybe here:
Same here. Our most profitable keywords and best performing keywords have seen increases. Really bad. I was told to increase our bid to $10.00 on the phone with a google rep, and then the bid would work it's way down. But $10.00 on a keyword that gets over 3,000 clicks a day historically would be $30,000 if the bid does not go down!
I wouldn't take that advivce :)
Let's face it folks....with only one source of income, google has to find a way each and every quarter to squeeze more profit out of it. Such are the joys of being a publicly traded company. perhaps if they management would stop churning non-profit per (beta) project after pet project, then perhaps they could focus creating another income stream.
...and you have to love it when they make statements like:
It is important to note, however, that the vast majority of advertisers will not be affected at all by this change, as they link to quality landing pages
...which subtley hints that anyone who is hit with these redicluous new bid max requirments ($.15 to $10.00!) is responsible due to a low quality page/site. Of course, all the conversion data google has mined for the apst few years has NOTHING to do with it (90% of the keywords hit in our account had high conversion rates).
Ah well....such life with a single engine that has such a market share. Sooner or later another wiz-kid will come along and invent a better engine.
Until then....I'm afraid we've just been priced out of google adwords. I'm off to work on my MSN/Overture campaigns ;-)
it would not explain why some ads, have lost good keywords,
but kept bad ones, and other ads the opposite (!), but, site
reachability if taken into account into 'landing page quality' on a momentary basis (when bot spiders a particular page),
WOULD randomly deactivate keywords perhaps.
It also would explain why setting these ridiculous mandatory minimum maxbids indeed some time, could bring the keyword back in action at normal price.
Meanwhile signed up on yahoo/overture first for one ad, and
same set of keywords as on adwords, pity it takes 3 days for the review. Also tried MSN, BUT there SIGNUP already did not allow my firefox/linux in, demanding explorer.. very disappointing...but they DO have a facility to IMPORT your adwords ads and keyword sets from the adwords downloadable lists! very smart,
LOL - same here, anyone recommend any good books for best practices on Overture (Yahoo! Search Marketing)? The do not have the volume we would like
Using google tools that get to SEE your sales results is very bad for biz.. for you who do it and for all in the trade.
Customers tend to want a fairly brief description of a product, a price and a picture. Sometimes it works well to have a long sales blurb, but not always. Does everyone want to see an essay before buying something? Not for all products.
Half a mil a year in advertising revenues is probably small potatoes to google, but I'm sure we're not the only small advertiser to be feeling the pinch.
Having said that, there may be some (unintended) results to this snafu of Google's - perhaps as more advertisers turn their focus to MSN/Overture, they will actually cause a dent in google's bottom line large enough for them to rethink these drastic changes. I can certainly understand prices going up slightly....but 1000%, 2000%, 5000% OVERNIGHT?
Frankly, having added over a million to google's coffers over the last 3 years, I'm more insulted than anything. Our business can survive without google, and has before, but treating paying customers so callously smacks of little more than greed. If they were TRULY worried about quality to the extent they talk about, they would simply disallow the pages/sites from bidding on the keywords in question, as opposed to extorting redicluous bid amounts. I mean, does anyone else see the hypocrisy here?
"We'll allow [what we percieve] as low-quality pages into our advertising program, but we'll just charge them an arm and a leg to do it."
Do no evil my ass.
Our most profitable keywords and best performing keywords have seen increases. Really bad. I was told to increase our bid to $10.00 on the phone with a google rep, and then the bid would work it's way down. But $10.00 on a keyword that gets over 3,000 clicks a day historically would be $30,000 if the bid does not go down!
I wouldn't do it either, but the general idea, if you wanted to try, is that you cap your daily spend at a relatively low amount, bid high for a few days, and see what happens to your required bids.
BTW, we haven't been hit by these increases, although we noticed that many of the MFA sites appearing on google search results, for the same terms we bid on are by and large, gone.
Overnight. Not all. But many. We'll see.
(Go to 'tools' in adwords, select find and edit keywords,
select some capaign(s) and look for all inactive keywords,
will give you such info).
Sign o' the times?
No matter how targeted my landing page, for new ads that I try to create all minimum bids are also at this vulgar high minimum CPC. Regardsless of how many advertisers or anything?
Anyone else seeing this or tried this?
Where is AWA when u need him...
Sign o' the times?Yep, MFA now means Made for Adcenter.
Spoke to my MSN rep who told me (maybe a bit too gleefully) that thousands of new accounts are being opened this morning which is affecting system speed. Sign o' the times?
Or simply a sign of panic. To paraphrase an old expression:
"If life hands you a lemon, make like a lemming."
[edited by: europeforvisitors at 5:19 pm (utc) on July 11, 2006]
Google is basically telling us that they know more about our pages and our customers than we do. Do they really think we would be paying money on ads if they weren't relevant to our pages? They get manually reviewed anyway.
It is not your landing page that got hit, it is your domain.
There are rumours that these are human reviewed sweeps. There are also rumours that you can ask for a re-review if you make changes to your site.
I think G is really shooting themselves in the foot with this one. Not because the are doing it, but because of the way they are handeling it. They are recreating the culture that exists in the organic side. There is not transparency and no communication. More importantly, there is no appeal process. Heck, they won't even admit to you that you have been affected. And they do not have to do this. That's what blows my mind. Give an advertsiser a clear list of changes that would fix it, and they would do it and be thrilled.
What this will do is drive away good advertisers with sites that could use improvement but don't know how to make improvements and will drive bad advertisers who figure out how to game the system to create massive amounts of adwords spam sites so that they can make as much money as they can before they get booted. Sound familer?
You will always have money grubbing webmasters, but without a good appeals process, they will be left with nothing but bad webmasters.
I find it so amazing that they did not learn this lesson the first (organic) time. This time, they have the chance to call up an advertiser and say, hey, it sucks, but if you do this, this and this and give me a call back, we will re-review your site. The money is there and they (and the advertiser) stand to gain. They are not doing and and it will hurt them in the long run.
The changes they want would increase the advertisers conversion, which would increase the money the advertiser had to spend, which would mean more long term profits for G.
Can an advertiser make changes now, sure, but they have no garuntee that those changes will help or not. Most business owners don't want to invest money in things that "might work, for a little while". They leave that junk to the get rich types.
Remember, most advertisers are in adwords because they don't have the stomach or know how to compete in the SERPs. Now G is telling them, they need the stomach and the know how. It won't fly.
The way it is done now, you will have an advertiser basically say, welp, don't need that kind of volitile advertising. I'll just do something else.
I did and I know what I need to do to get back in their good graces, for now. But I don't want to deal with this roller coaster. That's why I didn't get into SEO in the first place. Plenty of ways out there to make a buck. G don't need me, I don't need G.
