I personally am sick of having to go back every day and check for inactive keywords. Now they are in the thousands. I have corrected them to the minimum bid for the last time. It simply not worth it anymore. My time is more valuable than that.
I suggested that they have a way to be able to see all inactive terms at once and have a way to bring them up to minimum bid on mass. It would be easier to go in and find the ones that are too pricey and move them down or inactive than trying to raise thousands of them up to minimum bid.
Man I miss the banner days ...make a campaign and forget it....now you have to have someone check this sh*t every day. Well starting this week..I'm going to leave thousands of them inactive. I've done it for the last time.
Maybe if we all do that....they will get the message.
They've now started attacking my plain vanilla campaigns for selling my software products which I developed.
This min bid thing has gone too far.
I don't understand your comment.
Do you mean that you also have some sneaky/underhand campaigns that G attacked first?
Rgds
Damon
If the only way your business model works is for you to get $0.05 or $0.10 clicks from Google, you better find a different business model.
Our ads have nearly always run in the #2-#5 positions. I don't think that has anything to do with our keywords being deactivated. I'm fed up with Google's arrogance. No other advertising medium is so unstable. With AdWords, we have no idea how many keywords will run or for how long. At least with Yahoo/Overture and MSN, we know what to expect. With AdWords, we have no idea.
I'm sure part of their desire was to clean up the junk sites, and improve user experience, but at this point sure seems like increasing the CPC across the board was the main thrust....
Oh well, I needed to improve the quality of our sites always, I guess I'll have to do it now, and not later. I will say that like others in not only this thread, but others, the new Google has many holes in it, and does not seem to be very consistent.
Thanks for you input.....
Where is it written that Google is not allowed to change prices? In the AdWords User Agreement?
Where is it written that Google is not allowed to change prices?
Please, read again and read well. Nobody is saying that.
The complain here is about HOW they implement these price changes: unexpected, unannounced, unreasonable, unexplainable.
Where is it written that Google is not allowed to change prices?
Nobody is saying that.
The complaint here is about HOW they implement these price changes: unexpected, unannounced, unreasonable, unexplainable.
Lots of other companies aren't obligated to justify price changes, as long as no legally-binding agreements are broken.
No Demon, I have a lot of programming examples which contain programming code and discussion but are difficult to expand upon to an extent sufficient to have enough on page content to make the algorithm happy. I suspect the algo ain't happy with reading programming code either.
The idea was to get visitors to the site for the programming examples and then entice them into buy my consulting services. I can affort 3-4 cents to give someone a free example but I can't affort 20-30 cents.
If Google doesn't want our money then so be it. Couldn't care less at this point.
Ah, I see. I have a similar problem with my multimedia gallery, almost none of which contains text that AS/AW can see.
I tend to direct AW to my main index page for each topic, where there is more text, and where I can lax lyrical if need be.
I suspect that now AW has decided that some of your campaigns are "bad", rightly or wrongly, the screws are being put on account-wide.
I just noticed that one of my broadest campaigns was starting to convert less well (though it does come and go), so I've turned it off and left a cluster of much more specific ones, which is fine for the reduced budget it is on right now.
Rgds
Damon
The other part that drives me nuts is if I search for 'Widget Programming Examples' (and 1000 variations) my site is always in the top 5 from 50million results on G search. I, and 3 programmers used to make a living off of programming widgets and now it is becoming difficult.
I typically send adwords visitors to the index page for examples and apparently that wasn't good enough since not all the technical words (and synonyms) were on the index page. I couldn't send them to the detailed example page since that page has only enough text to explain the example and a bunch of programming code.
One last point - many of these keywords have no competitors (who else in their right mind would advertise for free examples!)
I'm screwed.
My ecommerce site also has a Low QS. Tried every suggestion on this forum and some but nothing works. But this low QS stuff is not account wide for me. I am currently relying more on my affiliates who are sending good traffic to me. Also got some free publicity in a regional newspaper that helps. Some traffic coming form G Content and Site Targetted ads. But things have gone expensive and volume of traffic is much lower. I am learning to adapt.
Our sites are nothing but quality, original content. We've even won recognition from major media outlets and are referenced by other sites on the web. Our sites are updated weekly. We do not have any affiliate links at all. No junk at all. And still Google deactivated our keywords. In my opinion, it has little to do with wanting quality and more to do with good old fashioned greed.
Just trying to help out someone earlier in this thread I noticed that I had only limited connectivity to their site. (They couldn't be see at all from a large UK corporate but could be seen via Vodafone 3G for example.)
Clearly, if the AW "quality bot" can't see your site then you're gonna get dinged on bid prices.
A very hard problem to diagnose, but worth checking for if you can IMHO.
Rgds
Damon
Was talking with Yahoo advertising support trying to get kinks out of my new ad campaigns.
The rep mentioned a large influx of support calls with new users over the last few weeks.
I wonder where they could be coming from? :)
Our Overture traffic has remained consistent, but again we wonder about the quality of sites such as 2006-deals.com, and all the second hand search engines they have partnered with.
But call me naive, ignorant, or whatever - I just don't think it is short term greed. I really think they are trying to improve the user experience. I think you guys that are getting "wrongly" wacked by this are simply the unintended consquenses of a less than perfect algorythm.
Man, I hope I didn't accidently drink the Google kool-aid.
So, I have not contacted her since the July onset of these problems. I have been improving our sites, adding content, and doing "things" that improve our sites, but just never had the time to do. The keywords that were locked out, are still locked out, but seem like new campaigns have "less" restrictions on them and these keywords are more in line with what we had before the July disaster.
So bottom line, Google is Google, adapt and try to work with them as they do have the highest quality traffic on the Internet. At the same time, trying to get a handle on the entire Overture “partner” traffic and assessing the quality and ROI of this traffic. I like the Yahoo direct search traffic, but the other traffic is suspect as best.
Thanks for all of your input……
Google has assigned a rep to handle our account, (who) told us that affiliate sites in their eyes do not add value to the user.
Some companies only sell through affiliates/distributors.
One of my companies has this approach with one of our products.
In this case there may be value.
Rgds
Damon
Other affiliates sites are just carbon-copies of other affiliate sites. Not too much long term value there.
Google is certaintly becoming too expensive, the Cost per acquisition is certaintly getting worst. Advertisers will only try #*$! months before they completely shutdown most of their adwords if its no longer profitable.
