At least this time Google is giving a heads up.
yup you and a lot more buddy..
I can see google's argument that it will force users to make their sites more pertinent and informative and offer an enhanced experience.. but why not offer a cost discount instead of a cost penalty?.. but no it's onwards and upwards every t$me
However they coat it and justfy it they are simply playing into other PPC SE's hands and the sooner a viable rival is born the better for all concerned.
Affiliates can't have uber targeted landing pages as they must offer far more content and scope apparently, yet at the same time now they must now be highly targeted..
it's no longer google.com.. it's G$$gle.com now ..
We have a site that is not spiderable and has not had googlebot/mediabot sniffing around to any degree (although it's not adsense - just thought I'd add that bot as it could be that it is part of the process).
If Google has not fetched the 30,000 different landing pages for that site but is penalising them then you have to assume it is site-wide.
We have that large campaign going inactive as I type (at a rate of 600 terms an hour - 13,000 of 30,000 terms are now inactive).
It's the only site that has been hit (but by far our largest spend).
I spoke with a rep earlier (before I realised how bad it was) and he was not very helpful as everything he suggested was not feasible. I'll have to phone again tomorrow to see what we can do.
This is very bad news for us. Bang goes the holiday.
If google.com ran adwords ad under "search" or "search engine" to their main page do you think it would pass this current "quality" test? Might be worth a try hehehe.
We have been hit hard in 2 accounts, each with plenty ads for
different landingpages, each having plenty keywords..
In almost every ad (relating to one landing page typically),
many key combis have become inactive, yet as far as I saw, at least for now, also all have some or many active left.
So, it must be per page, per keyword, as google also says in
their inside adwords blog. Yet the deactivations appear to be completely illogical and inconsistent after checking few adgroups.
As others have said, my crap keywords are running just fine.
My solution to this mess? I'm taking the rest of the day off. A few hours at the beach, a few beers over happy hour, and a few flicks should hopefully improve my state of mind. Beer makes everything better. :)
I'm going to wait for this crap to settle down before I do ANYTHING drastic. I'm hopeful things will settle down over the next few days. This is certainly the first time I've really been hit in a negative way by any of google's "quality" enhancements. $10.00 a click? No thanks.
Meanwhile, google has created a whole new SEO market... optimizing pages to meet the adwords 'quality'bot. Indeed,
they shooting in their own foot with a machine gun...
I'm going to wait for this crap to settle down before I do ANYTHING drastic. I'm hopeful things will settle down over the next few days. This is certainly the first time I've really been hit in a negative way by any of google's "quality" enhancements. $10.00 a click? No thanks.
Agreed. I think (as has happened many times in the past) google has gone overboard and over-corrected what they perceived to be a problem. I can certainly understand an incremental increase in bid costs, but 5000%+? That simply MUST be a mistake.
At any rate, we've almost completed moving our proven adwords campaigns to MSN, and (as soon as they get approved) will be watching our adwords account over the next few days to see if they wake up and realize they goofed. Looks liek today's adwrods spend will be about 70% below normal ;-)
If you think you have a possible violation or just want more information about what we do, contact the Citizen Complaint Center of the Antitrust Division:
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Address:
Citizen Complaint Center
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Hmm, strange. Last time I checked, purchase pages weren't meant to be informative. That is what the landng page is for. The purchase page is to make your purchase.
Also, it shouldn't even matter because only the landing page should be scored. OR atleast that is what I was told
If the site itself is scored, then they just lied to me.
I would simply be happy if they would let the market decide bid prices, as opposed to fixing them at levels based on a secret formula.
Another thing I find amusing is that, if this was (as I suspect) an attempt to rid adwords of the MFA sites, would't it simply have been easier to change the EULA to restrict adsense from being shown on any page marketed thru adwords?
I hope some of the legit press picks up on this....
Note: Just out of curiosity I changed one of our keywords to the suggested $10 per click. It reappeared in the #1 spot that it has held for 3 years (for $.15 per click), however, within minutes it had burned thru $100 in clicks (10 clicks @ $10), so when they mean $10, they mean $10.
[edited by: WebFusion at 7:19 pm (utc) on July 11, 2006]
and yes. I'm a GOOG shareholder.
iPo
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.
I tried this. One of my most profitable keywords was deactivated with a new minimum bid of $5.00. So I changed it to $5.00 to see what would happen. I expected it would get me number 1 position, although probably not profitable. Guess what happened? Nada. Zip. It's been 30 minutes and the ad still doesn't show for the keyword. When I run the Ad Diagnostic Tool, it tells me:
"Your maximum cost-per-click (CPC) bid is lower than the minimum CPC bid recommended by the system for your keyword."
Maybe AdWords is just really slow today with everyone changing bids. Or maybe the $5.00 suggested bid just means they're not going to run that keyword for any reason.
Just checked,... mass amounts of inactive keywords.
Why am I forced to live inside my Adwords account? Can't even look away for an hour these days. I want automated advertising, but I have to keep my nose in there adjusting bids and keywords every day.
calm blue ocean, calm blue ocean, calm blue ocean....
This blatant anti trust violation is not hard to prove.
If that's the case....I recommend you get an attorney willing to go toe to toe with google's deep pockets ;-)
Also nothing seems to have benefited. i am only seeing damage. Shouldn't the inactive ads ot others give me some relief on the ones that survived of mine?
If I was a baseball wholesaler and I sold megamegasuper sports baseballs for $1 and then turned around and sold the same baseball to dirty filthy sports for $3 and both stores were the exact same distance from the wholesaler in the exact same town, I would have 300 lawyers beating down my door
So does this mean that I can now sue Joe's Car Dealer down the street because they sold me the exact same car that they sold to my neighbor, but for $1,000 more?
Using your baseball analogy, what happens is that the baseballs sell for $3 to everyone according to the wholesaler's books, contracts, price lists, etc. But since "megamegasuper sports" is such a super, duper customer - they get a 66% discount on their purchases.
There is nothing in the law that prohibits a seller from providing no discount to one customer, and significant discount to another (my car example above).
So, effectively, what Google has done - for the sites that are impacted - is cut everyone's discount to zero.
You can't get a page much more relevant than that. This change will definately have to be revamped, or pulled all together. It doesn't make much sense the way it stands now.
This is starting to look like MSN has some insiders. Maybe they will overtake google after all.
They were extremely targeted with a lot of valuable content on the landing page and converted well. My visitors apparently thought that it was targeted!
The funny thing is that the Adsense ads on the same page are all showing up for that term or set of terms. It the Adsense bot thinks that the page is targeted , then why doesn't the Adwords bot agree? What really makes me angry is that the CTR was excellent and my average CPC had fallen to $0.04/ click with a max bid of $0.20. Now many of the terms are asking for $0.50 and $1.00. I may just go ahead and accept the higher max's and see where the bids fall out.
This blatant anti trust violation is not hard to prove. If I was a baseball wholesaler and I sold megamegasuper sports baseballs for $1 and then turned around and sold the same baseball to dirty filthy sports for $3 and both stores were the exact same distance from the wholesaler in the exact same town, I would have 300 lawyers beating down my door.
People offer/sell the same product to different people at different prices all the time - quantity discounts, wholesale discounts, ladies night drink specials, friends and family discount, Chrysler Employee Pricing, frequent customer pricing, discounts for cash, etc. etc. That's why a lot of government RFPs have a "most favored pricing" clause - they recognize that you sell products at different pricing, and they want the best price. I'm pretty sure that's not Anti Trust.
What really makes me angry is that the CTR was excellent and my average CPC had fallen to $0.04/ click with a max bid of $0.20. Now many of the terms are asking for $0.50 and $1.00.
Ok. Your answers are in the above.
The problem with what google is doing and how people are trying to make sense of it, is that a) google is probably not disclosing ALL of what the algo's are doing, and b) people are assuming they are. And, that the words google is using to describe what they are doing are not very well chosen, and probably don't reflect everything they are doing with this.
I don't have any doubt that their algo's take into consideration the things they publicly say it does. But it's pretty obvious that it is doing a whole lot of other things, which are the real factors in why some people are experiencing bid jumps.
For example, people are assuming that because their CTR is high, that google should reward, or at least not penalize. And that's because it kind of makes sense that CTR should be an important "quality" or relevance indicator. And google isn't saying otherwise.
But it's also clear that if you are getting a high CTR, while paying a very small price, that you aren't creating a lot of revenue for anyone but yourself. And that seems to be part of what google addresses, but calling it "a quality issue".
It's all confusing. It's being mismanaged by google in terms of communicating clearly, but that's not new.
Then if they say they'll give a discount for a quality webpage, and then charge one site $10 more than another site with the exact same page, I'd say there may be something wrong with that.
I am no apologist for Google by any means, but it is true that the few times I have actually looked for specofic product using Google - I end up with search sites, MFA sites, etc. Not always, but frequently enough to be a pain in the zorch.
It seems to me the problem is with Adsense - and adwords gets creamed because of Adsense abuses. I use some Adsense on my sites simply as a revenue offset for Adwords cost - not a living wage.
I guess I do not understand/know the breakdown between Adwords and Adsense as far as revenue to Google. I would think Adwords is by far the larger revenue producer. If that is true then it is a classic case of a company beating itself over the head with a hammer while muttering "Stop it".
But it's also clear that if you are getting a high CTR, while paying a very small price, that you aren't creating a lot of revenue for anyone but yourself. And that seems to be part of what google addresses, but calling it "a quality issue".
I fully understand that. In fact, I have no problem with google implementing INCREMENTAL price increases. Prices go up, that's life.
However, when you have product-specific ads, which link to a product-specific page, which sells a product costing less than $20....how on earth can google determine that visitors once costing less than $.15 each are now worth $10? There isn't a single merchant in my entire industry that has a conversion rate that would justify those kinds of costs.
At any rate....we've begun seeing action from a juiced up MSN campaign already (probably a good thing this happened....got us off our collective backsides to refocus on alternative PPC's), and conversions from there are at or above adwords rates, so time will tell.
It seems to me the problem is with Adsense - and adwords gets creamed because of Adsense abuses.
Agreed. however, an easy solution would be to simply ban any type of "arbitrage" by adsense publishers. Cut off the money, and the abuse would stop. This jsut seems like throwing the baby out with the bath water.
I wonder if this will actually backfirwe and cost google money in terms of lost advertisers. At this rate, we'll be spending tens fo thousands less per month on adwords than we have for the past couple of years.
Are people seeing this problem on keywords that have competition or rather keywords with no competition?
I am seeing raised minimum bid for keywords with loads of competition, as well as for keywords with less than a page of ads.
I have affiliate links on my sites. I do think that google hates affiliates.
Both, there is no rhyme or reason to this update. We found bid increases across domains, accounts, ad groups, campaigns, ect... We found non-effected keywords across the same domains, and in the same accounts, ad groups, campaigns, ect...
Also, some of our keywords have improved in position as well. So we won some, and lost some ground. I will evaluate the overall impact of this update next week once more data collects. However, it is never good when the most profitable, most searched keywords and most relevant (in my opinion) have bid increases in our account to $10.00 -- rendering them inactive because I will not pay that much.
