One key differentiating factor for these businesses are that they are consistently predictable(their system make sures that you get your service consistently) for all their suppliers and customers, people want to deal with them and do business with them... because it is very orderly...
What is the reason behind Google's success? For sure for advertiser they consistently change things and frustrates tons and tons of advertisers.... or maybe its just hype.. and eventually the successful company fades maybe? Anyways, on the front end for their end users its pretty consistent that's at least one thing going for them....
Why do you enjoy going back to businesses that gives you consistent service? and is Google doing the same for their adwords customers?
Just want to see what people think....
It stinks you've been hurt in the past too, sorry about that.
I do stand by my statement about them getting it near perfect the first time though. There is absolutely no excuse for them not to with something this important. I'd be less upset about perfection had they warned those who they were shutting off, but i've repeated that a billion times already so i'm not going to go down that route again. Take care EFV, trying to avoid this topic from here on out. It stinks, but i'd rather spend my time trying to improve my campaigns / ads than debating. :)
I do stand by my statement about them getting it near perfect the first time though.
I agree with that, but I'm not a programmer, so it's hard for me to make an informed judgment. To what extent is it possible for an AdWords/AdSense/Google Search beta test replicate real-world conditions, and vice versa? I simply don't know.
I agree with that, but I'm not a programmer, so it's hard for me to make an informed judgment. To what extent is it possible for an AdWords/AdSense/Google Search beta test replicate real-world conditions, and vice versa? I simply don't know.
It's not so much a programming issue but a logic and math issue connected with algos. As I've said probably a dozen times here, it's not possible to predict how an algo, or a specific change in an algo will affect one particular site or page, if the algo has any degree of complexity. It's similarly impossible for someone to manually review a site, and identify the exact reason why the algo scored it the way it did, without getting into some complex math (which is why reps aren't very helpful). Er, at least in most cases, obviously there will be exceptions.
...you need to actually apply it to a page, etc and see what happens, and obviously you can't do that with every single page, so there's always going to be problems when it goes into production. So, the issue is how much testing is done beforehand.
I believe google has been fairly consistent in its reliance on putting something into production, identifying the problems, and THEN addressing them by tweaking. For example, it has said repeatedly that it uses spam reports for serps as new data for the tweaking, rather than for manually reviewing individual instances.
There's clear economic issues at play here, but it's also an essentially fixed approach and philosophy, agree or not.
Let them know you're going to re-run the script 1-2 more times and get back to them on whether or not their pages are still flagged, or have been fixed before they actually launch it live.
I mean that just seems like common sense to me. It's mind blowing how they can just put a system like that live, but then again I don't run a multi billion dollar company, so I guess they're the ones doing something right. Maybe it's normal to make such huge changes without warning.
Isn't it possible though to run the algo through a test server, identify the sites that will be hit with this issue and contact them in advance by sending them an e-mail letting them know about it, then giving them a list of reasons why they could possibly be on the list.
Is it possible technologically to do so? Depends on the complexity of the algo, but the more specific the "reasons" you want from them, the harder it is to automate providing the reasons. I can imagine a situation where automated specific reasons tied to a site could be as much misleading as helpful. The more specific and helpful the reasons they supply the more they put themselves at risk, also (see below).
But it doesn't matter, because you KNOW that google is going to protect its algos, and not supply any information that would allow scumbags to game them. And if you consider that part of the reason we have this algo is because of those scumbags, do you really think it's reasonable for google to supply hints? And, if I gave you a list of 100 "possible" reasons why your site is flunking out, would that really help you anyway?
It's sad, but you know part of problems is cheats, and they DO ruin things for the honest who get caught in the same net.
They didn't even have to give 100 possible reasons. If this were really all about quality score and profit like they claim (which i'm not buying but that's a different story) they should have:
1. Ran the test script and found out which sites were going to be bumped.
2. E-Mailed those users and gave them a list of ad groups that were flagged.
3. In the e-mail, explain to them a little about what quality score is, what it's good for, and why they're doing it. Then direct them to the google pages that are already there which explain more about it and how to optimize for it.
4. Re-run the script, and send out similar e-mails to those who are still not meeting the standards.
5. Run the script one last time, e-mail those users still not complient, and e-mail everyone letting them know in x days / weeks the changes will be made live. If they still have problems with it after being live, please contact support and they will look into your account further.
Call me crazy, but that doesn't seem very hard to do, and it probably would have made a world of difference. I understand why these changes were made, many of the results were garbage, and they're concerned about losing traffic & revenue because of it. All I want is just better communication.
All I want is just better communication.
They could have done that, I suppose, but my guess is they would have been accused of giving NO useful information, and be accused of "communicating" solely for PR.
The sharks that hate google (but are willing to use them to make money if they can) would act exactly the same.
And the good guys affected couldn't use the vague information to do anything about this anyway.
BTW, in case you believe that this situation is "new" and their was no warning, consider that this quality issue has been "out there" since at least April. (someone can correct me if I'm wrong)
I guess people don't pay attention when their ad costs inch up, but they pay attention when it gets huge, but maybe that's a hint about why google did it (this time) with such high min. bids.
BTW, in case you believe that this situation is "new" and their was no warning, consider that this quality issue has been "out there" since at least April. (someone can correct me if I'm wrong)I guess people don't pay attention when their ad costs inch up, but they pay attention when it gets huge, but maybe that's a hint about why google did it (this time) with such high min. bids.
Last April it hit one of my campaigns. I didn't think it was a widespread thing, and wasn't notified by Google of it being such a thing. I contacted them and got the same replies i'm getting now "improve quality score". I don't read google blogs, in fact I didn't even know they existed until 2 weeks ago, so I didn't get any information that way.
I assumed my problem was isolated because I did work on the page, and haven't had a problem since. I also assumed my changes were quality enough because I had no trouble like you said about bids inching up. If anything my pages were getting better and better, I could inch the CPC down.
Sorry but when i'm getting near 10% CTR at .04-.05 CPC, and ranking 3rd-5th, it's tough to think my site would suddenly not be considered quality enough. There were no hints, no warnings, nothing after that (what I thought) was an isolated problem which I did learn from.
The biggest mind blower for me was that I had identical landing pages remain active after this last sweep.
Anyway, i've had enough debating about this issue. I agree with you quality improvement was needed. I will always say they could have handled it much differently, and for that I will always look at Google a bit differently. I once respected that company, now it's just business.
I suppose it would have been too simple to drop sites that ran adsense?
That might have worked if Google's only objective had been only to eliminate made-for-AdSense landing pages.
I suppose it would have been too simple to drop sites that ran adsense? A notcie to both groups saying you could not push traffic to sites with adsense through adwords. Might have solved a lot of pain for the rest or us.
And so that would penalize people who actually have excellent sites, even authority sites, have adsense on the site pages, create excellent products to sell (not just affiliates), and use adwords.
Like..um...me.
...and it wouldn't solve the problem, since there's also YPN that's used on landing pages using the MFY/A approach.
Google has the "visitors" and paying customers. They sell them to advertiser for money. They do not have real competition in terms of volume. The only thing that could really kill them is visitors choosing a different search engine. Google do not care about advertisers. They will always be there as long as visitors are there.
So the real Google problem is to keep visitors interested and maintain the value of the advertising to high levels. If all ads shown (or better, if the ads on the top 3-4 positions) are bad, visitors will not click on them anymore, not even on the relevant ones and slowly will start looking for a better search engine / way to find what they need.
In my campaigns - I noticed a few keywords that went up in minimum PPC ... I think that:
a) Your total average PPC for your campaign does count: if too low it is not good, as you may be getting too cheap clicks. I think the overall average should be at least .10 per click.
b) I noticed that for the keywords that went up for us - we do not have them on our landing pages at all.
c) The landing page needs to provide real value for visitors, that is, having links to other web pages that are also relevant to the search terms
d) I believe Google is now using PageRank, also for AdWords. If you bid on "New York Hotel" and your landing page + the links contained on the landing page would show up only on page 10 in the organic results, there is a real high chance that your page is not very relevant for that search term in Google's eyes... which is no good for the end-user experience ...
e) Beside automatic quality checks made by computers, I think there is also some human intervention that in some cases overrides the basic algo and makes the results inconsistent
Of course, I do not have scientific evidences in support to my points, but honestly this is what I would do if I was responsible for the Google AdSense program... :-)
And we, advertisers, just need to accept this or look for other ways to sell our products and services, hoping for more competition on the search market!
PS: I also noticed that for some of my keywords some major players are now bidding big money even if they are not selling closely related products.... Again this is bringing down the value of all the ads, not only the one at the top. This is a big issue.
if you think about those merchants or affiliates that brings low cost products to the end user(not necessarily good or bad quality but priced properly) won't be able to advertise any more... so the end effect... you'll be the judge... I guess..
and oh.. by the way.. there are still a few keywords out there that has really cheap cpc.. but those are the absolute minority... most are higher...than ever before...
Same is true of the browser market. Once lycos was king. Now google. Tommorow others. Advertisers (not just those affected) are leaving google or diversifying. Advertisers are SCARED. Not just those that got creamed, but those that are afraid of being destroyed by the next version of google's quality algorithm.
Google has made a major blunder. Bad press is resulting, and bad word of mouth. Advertisers are going to support alternative engines, which will fund them to increase market share.
They either reverse the landing page quality BS or there are permanent consequences. Google shareholders will be very unhappy if they knew what was going on here. Google's blunder is absolutely amazing. Their arrogance toward their advertisers is amazing. Arrogance is what brings down civilizations.
