All my normal keywords are up and running at or slightly below their usual price. No keywords were stopped, seems like just another day in my account.
I bid on about 5K keywords, spend a bit over $3000/mo. and have always set my max bid price so I would appear in the top 6. So far, my positioning seems the same and my per click prices are a tiny bit lower. Also, conversions have been good the last few days, but not unusually good.
Can someone explain what this big adwords change was so I know what to look for? Maybe its negative effects haven’t hit me yet.
And the changes will be when you stop seeing traffic. You'll go into your ad groups and nearly all of your keywords will require a min bid of like 1000%-2000% more than what you were paying.
My site does not run adsense, nor is it a site that has hundreds of different product pages that I would point specific adwords toward.
We have seen a daily decline in the number of keywords that remain active for almost all of our sites. Seemingly as each active keyword left in the campaign increases its CTR it is systematically eliminated on subsequent passes.
The keywords left active are the poorest CTR performers and are about as relevant as Black and White but higher performing keywords that even the google keyword tool states are highly relevant to the landing page are marked inactive.
There is something more to this than "Landing Page Quality".
Do you think this Google Adword action and the reaction to it will make any news headlines like the $900,000 cabinets for the Google party plane?
[edited by: rryan at 5:27 am (utc) on July 13, 2006]
What's the point of developing new groups and KWs when they penalize success.
It's like they want the good stuff for either themselves or another reason. These good KWs are then simply out priced for any WM to make a profit on.
Has any one seen a revert in any of the big 4 increase amounts. .50 - 1.00 - 5.00 - 10.00
I have not. Other stuff is fluctuating sometimes downword. But any of the big 4 still seemed locked in stone. Please post if you see any downword costs to any big 4 increase. That will be the first sign G has woke up from whatever they are smoking at Mountain View this week.
I suspect my campaign that has gone totally inactive is similar to yours in that I was getting high CTR on keywords costing anywhere from 3 to 6 cents or so. But I just want to comment on your "big four" comment. I don't see these numbers as my new minimum bids. I get 0.62, 1.24, and sometimes as much as 6.12 and 12.35.
And in a campaign where the increases are not so widespread and I can actually afford the increases in some cases, I'm seeing minimums like 0.38, 0.50, 0.62.
Don't know where these numbers come from. Just wanted to point out that they aren't the same all accross the board.
If you see a lot of very high CPCs, then you probably have issues. If you don't, then you're just fine.
I've taken a look at over 500 accounts now and have yet to see a single one hit yet. Still looking for the commonality for those who have, but seems a bit random (however, without logging into the account, seeing the keywords, ads, landing page, etc - very difficult to tell) as to who is reporting issues.
How do you have access to 500 accounts?
Going to poke around a few more MCCs later today.
[edited by: eWhisper at 5:33 pm (utc) on July 14, 2006]
Doesn't look like my account was effected at all. Again, I don't make money money off of Adsense, or thousands of differet product types, just one big product catigory. I wonder if that has anything to do with it?
so you are pointing thousands of kw's at pretty much one landing page? Interesting that google thinks that your single lander meets the quality threshold for so many kw's.
I’ve spent time on the phone with our “dedicated account manager” and she has indicated that it’s all about user experience. I think it’s more about Google bottom line, than user experience.
I’m trying to figure out what Google deems a quality landing page, but seem have figured that one out…
so you are pointing thousands of kw's at pretty much one landing page
My site sells one large category of services, it would be impossible to point adwords to specific pages since the site is a user created dynamic product directory. A red widget page may be live today and sold out tommorrow.
The home page serves as a landing page to get people to the most current page they need to be at to find the service they are looking for. So in 95% of all cases, the home page is the proper place to send new visitors.
Do you think it could be your very size that has protected you?
I think Google might be going after small companies per se. If there are a whole load of accounts logging in from the same IP address I suspect they are immune for the moment.
If they are going after small companies just because they are small, would that be illegal in the US and be the reason they have to lie about it and talk of a 'quality' they seem unwilling to define?
I can go on and on about small accounts, inventory, 12+ million small businesses, 9 billion in online advertising within 3 years, and how everyone is fighting for that pie - no one is turning a blind eye to that marketplace.
However, since I also run some small affiliate/personal stuff which is in no way associated with the company MCCs - I can say that they're not playing favorites. I only log into those accounts at home, so it's definitely not associated with the office's IP.
My minimum CPCs for some of my bids have gone down over the past few days and I see many keywords active between $0.01-$0.05. I've not had any CPCs with any abnormal changes in quite some time.
I have seen some accounts affected, but haven't made any firm decisions on patterns yet. One is emerging, but not ready to make firm statements about it yet.
We can see that a few very specific account has been hit extremely hard, whereas from a global point of view there is no clear indications of what is going on. It looks like the superb weather we have had in Europe this weekend has had a bigger impact on spending than the new google QS :-)
Yep, my (small) AW a/c has not been hurt.
I do run AS ads on the site(s) that most AW traffic goes to, but it is simply a public-service site and the ads go towards cost recovery. (GA reports me making a -95% ROI so you can see this is NOT an arbitrage site!)
Rgds
Damon
Something else for the affected campaign; I can't see my listing even if I search for the few active keywords..
