Other Side Of The Coin

Who Has Been Unaffected?

[humblebeginnings]

Tens and maybe hundreds of forum members have seen their cpc explode and their Adwords spendings go down the drain.
Many of us are in risk of seeing their business being destroyed. How many of us are (yet) unaffected by the QS change and what are the lessons we can learn from them? I for instance see little change in my campaigns. Only slightly lower volumes, but that could be caused by many things. I advertise on both content and search and operate in some of the well known competitive niches, like travel.

[bumpaw]

No problems here yet. Maybe Google will run out of bullets before they shoot us all.

Only a small fry with 4 campaigns though, but pure affiliate.

[beren]

No significant change. I wondered why so many people were complaining, and it turns out that many are "affiliates". Which is not something I really understand, but it seems that most Google users will be better off without those ads showing up on their screens. And Google will be better off, too, maybe in the long run.

[spander]

My site is a non-commercial site and I have seen about a 25% increase in ad revenue in the last few days.

[skibum]

No changes except more traffic with commerce sites. Just looked at a few ads to affiliate sites that IMHO have decent content and those minimum bids are sky high.

[poster_boy]

No substantial impact tied with the oft-discussed change of early July.

Despite that, my CPCs are up 5% since last month, 15% since May, and 20% since April.

[Great White Shark]

All is well on my end. In our industry, overall sales usually go down and they have a little bit but the ppc campaigns are yielding positive results. No change in CPC. The only changes I see in our cpc are the keywords we raised bids on.

[RockSolidWes]

I have a few campaigns unaffected. Funny thing is they are affiliate sites!

[bostonseo]

Unaffected by this recent push to rid the affiliate sites - still my prices are up about 300% since a year ago.

[RhinoFish]

my aff site's ppc and my direct-to-merchant affiliate ppc and all of the client accounts I manage...

not a single keyword affected...

yet...

[motorhaven]

All positive changes for me. Higher up in the results for the same cpc, higher click thru percentages and much lower cost per conversion.

Not an MFA or affiliate site.

[BlizzGirl]

The initial post mentioned learning something from people who are benefitting from the new AdWords QS changes - I'm not sure I can teach you anything, you've probably been at it longer than I have, but I can tell you what I THINK has helped us reap rewards instead of headaches.

We run AdWords campaigns for our clients (somewhere around 200 or so) - we serve a niche industry (hospitality, hotel & lodging) and we have had the benefit of learning from a few at Google during a program where you have a personal account manager assigned to you for 90 days. We picked his brain on an almost weekly basis and I collected questions from the whole office to ask. This was very helpful.

So back to the original - what we do:

1. Bid on EXTREMELY relevant terms, the broadest we get would be state-type terms, i.e. (Louisiana bed and breakfast vs. New Orleans bed and breakfast.)

2.) Bid to get ourselves in position 2-4 or so. We find clicks from those positions are less expensive and convert to return on investment better.

3.) Land our clicks on THE MOST relevant pages on the site. We are just beginning to think about using landing pages, so currently our clicks are landing on real pages on our website. If the adgroup is about activities in the area, we land that click on the activities page of the site.

Overall we've seen in increase in CTR and in some cases better ROI from our AdWords campaigns than we have in the past. I cant put my finger on the exact reason why this is "working" but maybe it's a combination of all three, or some other obscure thing we're doing.

I hope this helps, I'd love feedback on my little "theory in progress."

Thanks!
Carrie Hill

[edited by: BlizzGirl at 12:19 pm (utc) on July 21, 2006]

[eWhisper]

FYI, related thread:
[webmasterworld.com...]

I was just at a seminar with almost 100 PPC advertisers and only a dozen or so people realized something was happening with the quality score. Of those, only 1 claimed to have been affected.

Everyone else was unaffected, didn't see a change in their accounts and it was business as normal.

[martinibuster]

Unaffected. I had an initial price jump, dialed down the max CPC. Not a peep since.

[ScottG13]

We've not got dinged, as far as I can tell. Costs will be up this month, but it's our big spend month. CTR, CPC, Cost, and AVG Postion is all up from January. To be expected, as well.

[netmeg]

Unaffected.

I have one weird thing though - a keyword in an AdGroup I deleted months ago keeps showing up as inactive - even though it shows as "deleted". I can't get it out of my reports for some reason.

[TRex]

I think evaluating the landing page is a great idea so searchers get what they're looking for.
It also helps that I've seen my spend go down and revenue go up ;)
I think people who are complaining should reevalute their landing pages...

[RhinoFish]

Still unscathed here.

[Tropical Island]

No problems here.
Budget is right on target.
If anything I'm spending a little less than usual.

[sailorjwd]

Of about 60 campaigns and 250 adgroups only one campaign was truely devastated (80% inactive). Unfortunately this campaign brought in 80% of the visitors.

Most campaigns had <5% of keywords go inactive.

Non of my campaigns were helped by this change.

[BriGuy20]

I have a nickel-a-click bid for a site I run on an upcoming electronics product. CPC is still running under nickel, and I didn't notice any changes when the quality evaluation was switched on. Right now the page is an information page (lots of people REALLY WANT TO KNOW when this thing is going to come out), but I MAY turn it into a selling/affiliate page once the product is introduced. I'm not really making money now off it, but I'm hoping that there's enough buzz around the site that people come back when the product is announced.

I keep blog-style track of announcements, so the content changes ever so often.