AdWords Damage Call Thread

Let's start a tally - how much $ are you going to take away from Google?

[toomer]

There's been a number of references to AdWords budgets that have effectively been destroyed by todays changes. They're spread across various threads -- so if you're comfortable with restating those numbers again ... let's put them all here in one simple thread so that some intrepid journalist can find a quick and easy reference to tally up. And start writing about.

I'd recommend trying to keep the discussion to a minimum so that the thread doesn't go off track - just sticking to the basics of how many of your keywords have been destroyed, the %age increase you're being expected to pay, and - most importantly - the total amount of money you won't be spending on AdWords now due to the changes. Based on what I've seen so far ... it's in the millions already.

[ccam96]

Small advertiser .. 90% hit. $1200 / mo.

[jmorgan]

toomer, good idea but you should have started the ball rolling with your own figures.

[michaelhood]

0% hit.. $0/mo? Am I the only one with quality campaigns left unaffected by this?

I'll spend the next hour going through client accounts, and post any deviations.

[toomer]

toomer, good idea but you should have started the ball rolling with your own figures.

Fair enough -- but I only spend $100 per month in AdWords, basically because we just launched all of our sites at the beginning of the year and we're just trying to get a little bit of traffic for now. We're a series of specialty-interest/community sites, so no affiliates or e-commerce.

My AdWords campaigns were mostly off right now - I'll try going and turning them on to see what happens with our keywords.

[venrooy]

I spend 30k - 40k per month - on the verge of 400k this year. Right now most of my campaigns are on pause until we figure out if this big mess is permanent or not. Right now I have a list of over 50% of my keywords that will be deleted if this change proves to be permanent.

[soona99]

Six figures per year.

[bazza9]

Approximately $500k per year.

[eyeinthesky]

Forced to use scheduled ads, ie not show ads all the time.

Think ad spend will go down about 20%.

In the end, it may be a good thing :)

[briggidere]

am i missing something. what changes happened today?

[ConfusedWriter]

For the affected campaigns, $1500/month.

[ScottG13]

Medium sized b2b.

No keywords have been affected from what I can tell.

Thus no $ changes.

[sem4u]

No change across a number of mostly B2B sites.

[toomer]

So far, it looks like this tallies up to about $82,000 per month - $984,000 per year. But I know that there's several other six-figure spenders that haven't chimed in on this thread yet, so there's probably a few million more $ that will be affected by this as well.

[francie brady]

40k a year here - all is more or less toast right now.

[vanillaice]

Roughly 50k a year and growing.. well was growing

[OceanDoctor]

6 figures/year, estimating a cut of at least 50% if this new algorithm sticks

[DynamicNiches]

Just calculated it out to be around $300,000 less spending per year.

[toomer]

So now about $122,500 per month, $1.4m per year.....

[Need3lives]

We were running about $300k/year in spend w/ AdWords. Based on the severe hit and today's (pathetic) run-rate, it looks like we will be around $40k tops. So, a hit of at least $260k off our AdWords spend.

[laertes]

...which is chump change for Google.

[JustinSch]

Well over $100K/year and was planning to go way beyond that.

Basically all my keywords got hit, and I was providing exactly what my visitors were looking for!

Keep in mind, odds are whatever you tally this thread up to will only be a tiny fraction of the actual damage.

I would assume most people who got hit don't ever visit forums, if they do it's not this one, and if it is they probably won't respond to this thread... lurkers are common everywhere and probably are the majority of traffic on any forum.

So I really wouldn't be surprised if you're looking at 100s of millions of dollars lol. Maybe billions, who knows?

[jemcalil]

approx. $50,000 per year. 95% of keywords are inactive now.

[hfactor]

It's all about increasing the cost of keywords, screwing us who pay for the keywords, and increasing Google's bottom line. User experience, landing pages, it's all bull#*$!. They should just come out and tell everyone that the minimum bid is now $5.00 and be done with it....

~25% hit with $30K month

[Philosopher]

Roughly $15,000/mo. As of right now, my spend has been cut to 1/3rd of that.

[jdancing]

3K per month. Don't see any changes in my account except my avg Cost Per Click has seems to have gone down about 5 cents.

[TerriGW]

We are also a medium sized b2b.

And no keywords have been affected.

Thus no $ changes.

[toomer]

Tally: $173,600/m ... $2.0m annually

And I agree with both points made in the thread - this number, so far, is probably a fraction of Google's annual revenue. In fact, looking at them on Yahoo finance - looks like their annual net income is around $1.69B?

However ... for ever 1 person here complaining about getting hit, I'd hazard a guess that there are at least 10 other people that aren't here or aren't complaining. So now it looks like $20m annually. Maybe there's more than that - maybe it's more like 20x or higher? Again, as I said before - if this holds out for the remainder of the quarter, I'll be very interested to hear the next earnings call they have....

[cool1g]

i took a quick look at my ads currently running. now i spend WAY less then you guys, but only 1 has been hit hard by the $10 minimium. most are unchanged....

[holyearth]

I manage client accounts,

Due to the new algo,

$400K less per month!