Why hide landing page rules?

there is no logic in this

[ogletree]

What they have done is say we now have a standard that we want advertisers to follow but we are not going to tell you what it is. The point of paid advertising is for advertisers to pay to have an ad. If Google says you can only have ads that look a certain way then tell us and we will do it. All other advertising mediums that have rules post them and send them back with a reason they did not accept the ad they don’t just accept it and raise the price. Knowing the rules does not give anybody an unfair advantage. I have never heard of a situation where the price of something is based on secret rules. It is no different than going to a store and they base the price of your item by the way you are dressed or the way you look. What if a store decided that overweight woman can by tube tops but the price is higher because the owner does not think the woman would look good in it with the hopes that the higher price would convince the girl not to buy it. Nobody does business this way and could get away with it. Google is trying to squash creativity and tell advertisers that they are too stupid to design their own ads and web pages.

[buckworks]

I feel your pain, Ogletree.

Over the last week I've been working on a new Adwords campaign for a new client and I grow more frustrated every time I work on it. The minimum bid thingie makes uninformed and sometimes stupid decisions ... at least they certainly seem stupid from here.

Example: it makes good sense for an advertiser to bid on common misspellings of targeted searches, but Adwords requires significantly higher bids for close-but-not-quite misspellings, or for other variants such as differences between US and Canadian spellings.

Also, it doesn't seem to understand that when a specific landing page is set for a specific search term it ought to assess how well that page relates to that term, not just judge by the main landing page for the campaign as a whole.

Grrrr ...

[vphoner]

Its time for Google to scrap the landing page fiasco. Reminds me of the new coke. Its a no win scenario for google and for advertisers. I have not had advertising since July when this fiasco started, and even the google guy that checked out my site, said I was borderline, and he liked the site. But no clear way to fix it was given. Its a major blunder. But it can be corrected, but should be done quickly by removing landing page quality as a parameter unless of course its adult or violence.

Landing pages are meant to increase ROI. That is why we test. Google is imposing a system that may not lead to higher ROI, but lower. This in turn will make advertisers pay LESS for clicks, since they make less.

[ddogg]

I agree with the above posters. I am tired of Google insisting it knows what's best for me. Google's attitude towards its advertisers is quite insulting overall. "You're too dumb to manage and optimize your campaigns, do what we tell you instead!".

If only Yahoo wasn't so greedy and inept, and if only MSN wasn't so clueless..

Oh well.

[Quantam Goose]

You know, a key point has been hit here. The current scenario where google tells people with dollars to throw at them in effect saying 'Guess what we deem as "good" practices, because that will determine how much we charge you.' That really is a dysfunctional way of approaching business.

It would be far better if Google would officially, not buried on forums, say this works and this does not. I think it is time for AWA to step up and clarify this. If it entails a massive corporate policy change, then I suggest AWA lobby for it.

NOBODY, has a problem with Google running its business in such a manner that dictates - if you "xyz" you will have minimum bids of $10.00. Clarity, after all the gas on these forums, is what is required.

[sailorjwd]

QS is driving me crazy. I have Googlers looking at my landing pages and seeing only generalized topic content and no additional links about the topic being searched.

Little do they know that the landing pages reconfigure themselves based on the referrer information when coming in through search or adwords click.. text blocks and additional links are added right at the top.. But they never see it so I'm screwed.

Come on google - you can do better than this.

[ebuilder]

This QS thing has made me concentrate on improving my site. I am still getting content clicks, can't afford the $10.00 clicks, and my conversion rate today for the small amount of content clicks is over 12%. 6x better than before. Now if I could only get the traffic I had before I would have a real winner. Actually, I wrote them yesterday and received a nicer than expected reply. I was told that there is no such thing as a manual review. And that it could take several days to see minimum bids drop. It has been 2 days and I have seen $10.00 bids drop to .50 and 1.00. Maybe there is hope afterall.

[ogletree]

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