The issue I would like for you to address is of course is the radical rise in the minim bid costs that many of us are seeing. To get at this problem, I spoke to one rep on the phone today as my personal rep is “unavailable” and has been all day. I sent a lengthy email to support early this morning (my rep) and left a voice mail for my rep to contact me immediately. So far the only response I have gotten was from the lower the level rep when I declined to leave another voice mail for my personal rep. She was very apologetic and nice, but didn’t know what was going on. She told me all the reps were told was to expect some changes, but that they were not told what the changes would encompass or whom the changes would affect. She said she had spoken to some customers today that had similar issues, but simply put she doesn’t know what to advise them as she doesn’t know what the new quality system looks for other than the generic stuff from the Google Ad Words page. She looked at my account, and I had her note the same ad had been running in excess of 2 years and had produced a click through rate of 26% in those 2 years, and she agreed it wasn’t really possible to increase the quality the ad itself. She had no idea how often the bot looks at the pages so you can see if changes you make actually improve your quality score.
Your employees have been uninformed and left in the dark about these major changes to your program, and perhaps more importantly your paying customers have been left in the dark as well. The smart thing would have been to come to the community months ago and said hey we are thinking about some major changes, these are how these changes are going to affect you, and here is what you can do to bring your landing pages up to snuff. That way your business partners would not be left holding the bag when they are hit with overnight radical price increases, and are forced to seek immediate answers from your employees who have also been left in the dark, and have no useful information to provide your customers. I would suggest as good business etiquette and professionalism would dictate you roll these changes back immediately and evaluate what you have learned from this. Then come forward and announce what changes you plan to make, describe in detail what accounts it will have a negative impact on, and provide in detail guidelines for producing the type of landing pages that you want. That way your business partners can make a business decision as to if they want to continue to do business with you under the new system.
Sincerely
Mark A. Libbert
Attorney At Law
P.S. If any Overture/Yahoo rep is lurking I have 10-12k a month buy for you.
I'll give you my story so you can preach some more:
My max bids for one of my campaigns that got hit last week were set at $0.45. I paid on average $0.41 per click because of the auction style of Google Adwords.
Last week I got hit with the minimum bids of $0.50, $1.00, $5.00, $10.00. I raised my bids to $0.50 because I can still barely profit from that. So a bunch of keywords get reactivated.
So, same landing page as before, same user experience, same 'quality', its just that now I'm paying $0.50 per click (and not a cent less), instead of $0.41.
So tell me what that has to do with user experience? I'm offering exactly the same service, exactly the same quality, I'm just paying more!
I have requested and got a review (so I am told) but they still want me to adjust the landingpage.
its just a matter of time...
I actually run an Adwords related website with about 3k signups to my newsletter, and I asked for people to tell me their thoughts re: the algo change...
and like I said earlier, it still looks like randomness. But I have told everyone that we will get over this, and we will.
The dust will settle at some point, and the market will adapt...
anyway, that google is doing this to improve long term relevance seems beyond dispute.
Their blod update said it was that.
There is no point in in effect forcing your advertisers to bid $10 when they wont and you will lose short term revenue if it was about short term targets.
Google is obssessed with end-user relevance, and it is safe to assume that their intention related to that.
That much seems logical.
The way they are apparently trying to accomplish it, however, seems illogical and incoherent.
So, either they 1. screwed up really badly or 2. they know exactly what they are doing.
One thing, however, is pretty clear at this point: they really do *think* they know what they are doing as witnessed by the fast and viscious change.
In any event, a domain change appears to cure the problem with no other changes to campaigns - BUT I did increase my CPC too (and increasing my CPC has in some cases got my keywords active without a domain change)...
"a domain change appears to cure the problem with no other changes to campaigns"
So you moved your current landing pages to a new URL, and then modified your existing Google campaign ads with this “new” URL”, and your keywords were reinstated?
Can you provide more details?
Thanks in advance,
Rinse then repeat. Till one day I'm just too busy.
[1] With their consent, though not enthusiasm.
If yes:
Based on what "quality" did you get your keywords back?
What is your monthly budget?
Bottom line, it's 90% about more profit, and 10% about quality of search...
Who shorted the stock when I said to a week ago? And who pooh-poohed the idea?
:)
If an account holder want to raise their bids to $10, then its a win for Google.
If you refuse Google's demand and instead adjust the bid up a few percentage points your keywords run and it is still a win for Google.
Seems like an evil negotiation tactic to take $10 for a keyword just because the account holder is underinformed.
How many times will Google try to go back to the well to test account holder's bid thresholds? Is there any limit?
Seems like an evil negotiation tactic to take $10 for a keyword just because the account holder is underinformed.
The only problem with that logic, is that when they do that - they permanently lose many of those that they price out. And those that are underinformed may stay around for a while - but it will most likely be a short while - at least until they get their bill. So that is only a short term win.
Who shorted the stock when I said to a week ago? And who pooh-poohed the idea?
AHHHH, Man. Did you say short the stock?
I thought you said "stock your shorts".
I'm not even going to tell you what I've got sitting in my jockeys.
Goes to show, even us smart folks get it wrong once in a while.
I thought you said "stock your shorts".
This is possible. Been a long week...
We're no more than gnats to swatted.
It doesn't take much to make a stock go into freefall you know, if you pick the exact right time. And now is a very good time.
If 10% of us here make it our business to contact journalists online who have recently mentioned the big G, talk about the Ebay ads for heroin, the lies, the price hikes, the mass migrations to Adcenter, the poems, and the stock price slide - we'll soon see who swats at who.
Mostly you can't touch them. But I used to be a drummer and have a feel for timing, I also follow foreign currency exchange markets which is how I knew what I was looking at when it came to the share price chart.
Believe me. It would take very little right now to wipe the smiles off some smug geeky faces and send that graph south for the winter.
[edited by: Alex_Miles at 3:18 am (utc) on July 22, 2006]
The problem is that google in order to get a better user experience is going to ruin its advertising model and make it less attractive and in effect ruin its advertising base.
The keyword (no pun intended) is predictability. If you can't be sure that your campaign won't be shut down by the current or FUTURE black box algorithm for quality of landing pages, then you won't take the risk of hiring more employees, and leasing a larger facility, and developing a supporting website. At least not with google.
With the other search engines, you advertise. Thats it...you advertise.
I don't see newspapers telling their advertisers that their stores have to be a certain way for the "user experience". Can you imagine if newspapers required say a department store to put white carpets out
for customers or they can't advertise?
This whole thing is ridiculous and ruins the entire advertising model that made google great. Its a broken system now. Poorly thought out, and the consequences of unpredictability will come to roost soon.
As they keep saying they like to do things differently. They donot follow the crowd or normal logical thinking. It always has to be an 'innovative ' way . The problem for Google has originated on account of MFA's and crappy sites with no content and only adSense. They tried to go after this problem from the adWords side, when actually they should have logically gone after it from the 'adSense side'.
The whole issue of 'Quality score' and 'Quality of Landing pages' makes more sense for the adSense experience of the surfer not adWords.
All they had to do was check the quality of the pages displaying 'adSense' using an algo and disable ads on sites which they perceived as low quality. This would have helped a lot in improving surfer experience and also would have encouraged webmasters to create more quality pages to be eligible for adSense.
You are delusional.
But I'm happy.
The entire market got slammed in the past week. It is not some kind of genius on your part.
Some parts of it got slammed rather more than others :)
Go ahead and contact the media. I want to see you create a freefall out of this.
You probably don't.
What you want is a figurehead. So you can get at the messenger instead of the message.
Thats so twentieth century.
[edited by: Alex_Miles at 8:42 am (utc) on July 22, 2006]
But keyword advertising is competitive and is getting more so. How many search result pages do you think a user will go when searching on a keyword? Not many. At least for me, if I can't find what I am looking for on the very first page I either refine or give up (occasioinally I'll try my luck on Yahoo search) most of the time. And how many ads can be shown on a single Google search page? 3 + 8 = 11. That's very limited space for so many advertisers to compete for. If Google doesn't try to make these ads enticing for its users to click on, soon AdWords will be regarded as irrelevant. And that's the last thing Google, as well as you, advertisers, would want. Whoever thinks that keyword advertising is just another form of yellow pages or classified ads needs to open his/her eyes.
Believe it or not, Google cares about its users [google.com]. Note that we're talking about Google search engine users, not AdWords/AdSense users. They cater to what users' need, and nothing is more important than that. This is exactly the reason Google got to where it is today. And they will continue to do whatever they think will provide a better user experience. Given the constant change and evolving of the internet, Google has to adapt in order to survive. And that also means whoever depends on Google to make a profit will have to adapt too.
swirl gave a good suggestion early in the thread, go read a book called "Who Moved My Cheese."
If you want a true picture of what may be happening go read: "When Genius Fails: The Rise and Fall of Long Term Capital Management"
Now that book was exciting and reminds me of Google: i.e.: black box, lots of smart people (LTCM actually had Nobel Prize winners!) and they almost killed the economy on the way down.
But keyword advertising is competitive and is getting more so.
Obviously, not competitive enough. Otherwise, Google wouldn't need a landing-page quality algorithm. The market would deal with that if the market were truly competitive.
If Google doesn't try to make these ads enticing for its users to click on, soon AdWords will be regarded as irrelevant.
If advertisers didn't make the ads enticing for users to click on, then they wouldn't be cost-effective for the advertisers. IF it were a truly-competitve, pure-auction market.
But Google has made meeting users needs and making the ads and landing pages enticing to the user largely irrelevant. Instead of meeting users needs, advertisers have to meet the needs of an unknown black box.
If advertisers didn't make the ads enticing for users to click on, then they wouldn't be cost-effective for the advertisers. IF it were a truly-competitve, pure-auction market.
Unfortunately adsense and click arbitrage skews that argument, adsense (and to an extent other ppc on landing pages) make it possible to have no useful content and still make money.
The upshot is if google wanted to clean up adwords, get rid of arbitrage, not write a bizarre and inconsistent "quality" algo noone understands.
Oh for the happy days of min 0.5% clickthroughs .....
If you are advertising to sell your prodcut and google doesnt like the product for secret reasons then google will determin what you have to pay.
It would be more accurate to say that, if Google doesn't like the way you sell your product, Google will set a price so high that you won't want to pay it--in which case you'll either fix the problem or go somewhere else.
Also, the law of supply and demand does apply in this case, because "price" can be defined more broadly than "bid." In this case, the price includes the cost of meeting Google's landing-page requirements, and the demand for AdWords clicks will determine whether Google can sustain that price.
There only has to be 1000 other adwords advertisers just like me to drop G's revs by about 8%. That would be significant.
There only has to be 1000 other adwords advertisers just like me to drop G's revs by about 8%. That would be significant.
I don't know if your math is right, but let's say it is. What you don't understand is that there WILL be an increase in revenue from OTHER advertisers who are paying more per click than the high CTR/low CPC people that leave. I'm one of them.
So, any loss will be somewhat offset, completely offset, or end up as an increase (none of us can know).
It's fairly trivial for google to have simulated the effects of revenue using some scenario simulations so they know what the effects of various levels of defection will be. It won't be completely accurate of course, because its' trying to predict human behavior.
The other thing you aren't considering is that they are trading the revenue you think they will lose to ensure they won't lose a much larger number over the next years as a result of visitor behavior.
For example, have you considered what it would cost google if their overal CTR across the entire network dropped by 1%, 2% as a result of junk ads? Angry surfers?
Finally, I guarantee you that google did what they did for two other reasons. They have data to indicate a trend related to revenue that shows that as the "quality" of ads/sites has deteriorated over the last x months, their revenue model doesn't work right anymore. So, they had to do something.
The other thing is I believe the head honchos got really p*****ed off at how they dreamchild has been abused, and said "Fix it, and I don't care how these slimeballs complain".
Of course, google created the problems for itself that they are trying to solve, and the solutions will create more problems they will have to address. Such is life in corporations, in fact ALL large organizations, government, profit, non-profits.
