At least this time Google is giving a heads up.
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.
Not a bad idea, but as a practical matter, wouldn't it mean that that AdWords advertisers couldn't run AdSense ads? How would that play with advertisers?
Are people seeing this problem on keywords that have competition or rather keywords with no competition?
Both - but mainly with keywords that have little to no competition. All of our pages have links to butt-loads of valuable & targeted content. We have forums, newsletters, daily tips, and other content all with NO AdSense ads. Yet G wants $10.00 a click on every keyword. Other advertisers for the same keywords have 50 words of content and are being shown. They are not paying $10.00 a click either because their product price is only $29.97
Last year we spend over $400,000 on Google (around 1100 a day). Today we have spent about $45.00
But hey, I guess that is all they want from us... :-(
Not a bad idea, but as a practical matter, wouldn't it mean that that AdWords advertisers couldn't run AdSense ads? How would that play with advertisers?
Except that arbitrage is also done using combinations of different programs (ie. adwords + YPN).
Has anyone ever actually had AdWords "humans" lower bids for them because of a mistake on their end?
It is like I am blinded! I have followed all of their quality score guidelines over the last year, yet they still want $10.00 all of the sudden. Its a bunch of BS that makes no sense...
Go figure...
Google says our landing pages are not relevant but still puts us above the number 1 organic result. This stinks.
I do think that google hates affiliates.
<puts on tin-foil hat>
Of course they do. If they can slowly and surely kill off the entire affiliate business model by changes like this, it certainly bodes well for their new PPA & GBuy offerings in the coming months, no?
</puts tin-foil hat back in drawer>
Not a bad idea, but as a practical matter, wouldn't it mean that that AdWords advertisers couldn't run AdSense ads? How would that play with advertisers?
I would say only on the inital page the user lands on....but that's neither here nor there.
If google were searching for a way to alienate it's advertisers, it hit pay dirt. Honstely, is anyone here actually willing to pay 1000%+ more per click?
It would be one thing if they were being realistic about it all, but it's clear they're not. They jacked up the price of many keywords for many people to insane amounts, many 100's of times more than they were paying. It's not like jacking up .05c to .10c bids because of relevance.
My situation is a joke. I've had ads running for months with .05c, decent CTR, decent rank, steady, etc. I have 6 active campaigns, all with nearly identical templates for the landing page, but everything on each page is heavily related to the terms i'm using, including the domain name the page is on. So while it is a one page landing page, it's not MFA (I have no adsense on it) it's just an extremely relevant page that links to sponsors that exactly fit the keyword. This is what they recommended doing when they removed the ability to have the same domain listed twice.
Anyway, what is absolutely strange is they arbitrarily decided 4 of my campaigns will be hit with the quality score penalty, while the other two will not be touched even though they have the *exact same template* as the 4 that were made inactive.
So how is it at all possible the quality score hit rock bottom with 4 landing pages to a point where I have to pay 2000% more for my keywords? It makes absolutely no logical sense other than google is trying to scrape even more cash from loyal clients.
I had a sinking feeling in my stomach when they went public. I knew they were going to go from a pretty cool company to one that just tries to please shareholders.
Sorry for sounding a little upset, but my entire business is working with my adwords traffic, so they just destroyed me if they keep their stance on the new quality scores.
retracting from an earlier posting: it looks site wide
'penalizing' and not landing page related like they claim,
nor keyword related. it just took some time for all the key combis to become inactive..
- Niels
Google just called. They said good luck. This is a top down inititive and it is designed to get rid of low quality sites. I guess I am low quality.
Is anyone still uneffected? This seems so wide spread.
Still not affected yet, just looked at our active campaigns (I should check inactive ones).
Then I read this from the blog...
"Although it is counter-intuitive to some who hear it, we'd rather show one less ad than to show an ad which leads to a poor user experience -- since long-term user trust in AdWords is of overarching importance."
Then I look at the listings again and just start laughing.. I can't believe he believes the stuff he types on his blog. That's a flat out lie. If it were true, not only would they get rid of my sites, they would get rid of the irrelevant garbage listed.
I hope he isn't lying about this part...
"If you do see an increase in minimum bids and you feel that your landing page is providing a great user experience, please contact AdWords support and we'll take a look."
Although he probably isn't. They'll check out my pages and give me some generic reply about how I need to improve my quality score. I'll be absolutely blown away if they undo the changes they made to my account.
for those that like to see some concrete examples, there is a really good one at the #*$! adwords forum. its hurting good sites more than it is helping, it seems.
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.
My ads finally began running for the keyword I changed to the minimum suggested bid of $5.00. Although, I was mistaken. It's a minimum bid, not a suggestion. All my clicks cost me $5.00. It doesn't appear that raising your bid to the minimum will cause them to fall in price eventually. This is keyword with a good CPC and conversion rate.
All my clicks cost me $5.00. It doesn't appear that raising your bid to the minimum will cause them to fall in price eventually. This is keyword with a good CPC and conversion rate.
Yep, that's my experience as well. I'm still going to give this a few days to settle out.
Having said that....I've been telling fellow online merchants for years that they should develop a reliable PPC are of their overal marjketing strategy, but with this kind of unannounced price gouging, I wonder if I'll still be giving that advice in the coming months...
Oddly (or maybe not, given that it is Google), still seeing a lot of ridiculous sites still running for keywords we have been disabled for. Sites that have NOTHING but a <h3>Keyword String</h3> followed by ads. Pretty frustrating and most discouraging.
I see the exact same thing! I guess that is what Google thinks is "Quality." no need to create content then.
Do we go back and try to increase the quality of our landing pages? If so, what guidelines do we follow? The ones provided by Google?
The one problem I have is that it's so darn vague. And even then, there's no guarantee that it's going to work.
The one problem I have is that it's so darn vague. And even then, there's no guarantee that it's going to work.
Your right! Their guidelines DONT work even if your strictly follow them! On the majority of our landing pages we have links to daily tips, forums, articles, we provide FREE downloadable ebooks. We even run free opt-in newsletters on most of our landing pages. We have no AdSense ads, we have a strict privacy policy, we have a decent layout with little graphics, etc.
Still $10.00 a friggin click and G's same response is "please refer to this page" and follow all of the guidelines. "Please provide relevant content". A shout-out to Google: "WE ARE PROVIDING SUPERB CONTENT AND RELEVANT PAGES, YOU NEED TO PROGRAM YOUR RETARTED LANDING PAGE ROBOT!"
Over the last 3 years we have studiously researched keywords, tracked ROI, and organized our adwords campaigns for maximum efficency. Our strongest campaign is organized into 50 ad groups, each containing 8-10 keywords for a total of around 500 phrases....all directly pointing to relevant and focused product pages.
Yesterday's ad spend: $2156
Today's ad spend: $194.78
....AND to cap off today's successful rollout of Google's "improvements", we now have four active keywords left.
FOUR. Out of 500.
Of course....according to the exceedingly helpful adwords rep, we are welcome to turn our traffic back on by improving the "quality" of our site and/or accepting advertising rates that our 1000-5000% higher than we've paid for the last THREE YEARS.
You really have to laugh at the state of google these days ;-)
[edited by: WebFusion at 1:03 am (utc) on July 12, 2006]
I just can't believe they have the nerve to say a "small" amount of advertisers have been effected. On EVERY Internet marketing forum I post at I see threads like this popping up like crazy within the last 24-48 hours.
I agree. Very poor way to treat your customers. I lost all respect in that company today.
