Here is our situation and what we may do... We Spend approx 30k per month:
So far thousands of keywords have been disabled across our different accounts. Most of these keywords only get a couple of clicks per day. Our big conversions come from content clicks. Our adgroups are very specific and modular therefore we get high converting content clicks..this is good.
Building more specific sites for groups of keywords that convert is something we will consider....
Forgetting about all keywords that are irrelevant - even if they did make you good money is tough.
The big problem is getting around the scenerio where you are selling Green Apples and bidding on [red apples, redapples, buy red apples, etc]...
Google quality control does not like this. You either have to pay or proove what you are saying in your ad is true - which is often hard......
What will you do?
What I've done so far:
1. Contacted my account rep at Google and made my case. A "Quality Score Specialist" is reviewing my case. (A long shot but worth a try...)
2. I track conversion for all of my keywords. For those still alive, I've bid up the most successful ones to higher positions in the hopes of compensating for the keywords I've lost.
3. I've begun moving my portfolio to MSN, Yahoo, Ask, etc.
4. Since I run affiliate sites, I've contacted the affiliate program managers at Amazon and CJ to alert them to the situation and encouraged them to open a direct channel to Google. A major loss of PPC advertising will no doubt seriously impact the affiliate networks. I encourage others to do the same with their contacts at other networks/merchants.
What I'm considering, depending on the outcome of #1:
5. Creating new landing pages. Since my pages are already SEO-optimized, content-rich, with PR=5, this is easier said than done, especially with the vague guidance provided by Google.
6. Moving everything to a new domain that is presumably not yet contaminated by a Quality Score god. Might work for a while. Perhaps switching to a fresh domain whenever one goes south would work? (Hey, desperate times...)
7. Create a new account to see if that also helps.
Someone suggested removing Analytics from the landing page on another thread. Curious as to whether/why that would help.
Yes, it does work -- for a while -- until their next update (up chuck).
Did this last April and have moved a few ad groups this time. All keyword costs are back to the normal cpc.
I'm waiting out a few low performing ad groups. If things don't settle, I may just let them whither away ....
I think a lot of the 'disabled' keywords could be brought back to life by linking directly to a merchant site.
If you own your own product google will make it easier to advertise.
I doubt they reevaluate your website for each and every keyword. there must be some global properties that they store about your website.
CJ
