New landing page score is ridiculous

It is complete nonsense. They are now just greedy.

[Soze]

46,706 183,091 25.50% $0.05 $2,218.73 1.2

Now my min bid is no longer good enough. They are raising prices for no reason. My old min bid was .01 and now it is .20.

[Soze]

Good thing I have duplicate adgroups set up. My other group with the exact same ad and keyword is .01.

[toomer]

I think we'd all be curious to know - in detail - what your landing page looks like, in order to justify a 2000% increase like that... if for nothing else, so that others of us could avoid it.

Is it a forum? Blog? MFA? Other?

[Soze]

i'm going to start changing my text around to see what the deal is

[edited by: jatar_k at 3:31 am (utc) on July 11, 2006]
[edit reason]
[1][edit reason] no urls thanks [/edit] [/edit][/1]

[Soze]

Who is a bot to say what is ideal for a landing page? Believe me when I say that the landing page is very targetted for my keyword.

[toomer]

Interesting.

For those of you who didn't see the site Soze mentioned (I'm assuming the same "No URLs" policy applies in here - so his message will soon be edited) it's a site with 10 images of 1920's and 1930's era actors and actresses and very brief text descriptions. I find no adsense on here, nor any affiliate links - which would be the typical red flag you'd expect to trip the "landing page quality" alarm.

What I think you may be getting hit with, though, is that your site - at least based on that URL - is bascically a one-page site. A one page site with 10 images. No text about the actors or actresses, and just the same text describing each print "cream-toned bromide print..." etc. etc.

Even though you are clearly not a Made For Adsense site -- your format mirrors that behavior closely enough (with the obvious exception of any actual monetazion on your site) that G may be enforcing some type of penalty on you based on how they now define landing page "quality".

I wonder if changing your layout - maybe mention each actor/actress, then a brief bio, then links to the images - might help you a bit.

[Soze]

I do have a small frame at the bottom which I use to cookie users as well. I talked on the phone with a specialist about getting this ad to run and mentioned the cookie in the frame and said it was perfectly fine. I find it hard to believe an iframe would make it poor quality all of a sudden. I am going to ad more pages and content now.

I guess I'll actually ad some nonsense content to the site and see if that helps.

The fact that the keyword is still fine in another adgroup goes to show the incredible inconsistancy of the adwords quality score.

[edited by: Soze at 1:44 am (utc) on July 11, 2006]

[cjshu]

As I stated in another topic I've had keyword bids go from 30 cents to $10!

CJ

[sailorjwd]

On programming example pages I've got many 5 cent keywords going to $10.

Maybe I'll get a few $7 clicks on those pages... if someone accidently gets to them.

[bostonseo]

But are they doing an official press release about this? They seem to announce even the smallest bit of positive news via newswire. I'm guessing a press release that documents such dramatic price increases isn't something they want everyone to know. I'm sure there will be another release about Dell before the month is out :)

[Soze]

I just copied the entire site to a different domain and now it say the min cpc is .02.

Hmm so two langing pages that are exactly the same, but on diff domains have a difference of 10x.

pffft.

[netmeg]

Don't expect it to stay at $.02.

[jortiz]

Changing your site to other domain will make google algo to give you a testing time so it may see how much money you are up to spend, i´ve seein accounts quite budly made with .02 for quite generic words that became quite expensive two monts later.

[vanillaice]

25.50% $0.05

IMO, this is your problem, not your landing pages.

You've 'beat' the Google system, and now they're slapping you down a few notches. I don't think they've expected or wanted people ranking near #1 with 0.05 click keywords. So, they slap most of us who have figured out ways to improve our ads, and allow something like this to be #1...

10.00% $0.20 = 19,309 clicks = $3,861

That's better than your $2,218

Just my opinion though. They're really trying to knock the .05 guys from having high rankings to allow those who want to spend their way to the top up there.