So I'm totally shut out.
So who's in first place now for my biggest keywords? One of my affiliates selling my product. So apparently an affiliate is higher quality than the actual merchant.
Spot 2 is a total MFA site and spot 3 is "Buy KEYWORD on ebay"
Quality!
But if you are the genuine merchant maybe you should pay some attention to your site content - you should be able to do better - maybe seek a manual review and get some advice from Google - have you anything to lose?
[edited by: Pengi at 9:48 pm (utc) on Nov. 14, 2006]
1. aggressive optimization based on a conversion frontier, which often had us in spots 3-6 and almost never in spot 1.
2. huge gap between our CPC and that of the #1 position
We were sniping bargains, and Google stood to gain by getting us out of the picture and putting more eyeballs on less efficient bidders. I think it's a good strategy, economically speaking, though time will tell whether calling it a quality score was a good move.
Tell me, do you fit the 2 attributes above?
luke175, your situation is as perplexing as mine was when I got hit last April. I sell "stuff"...no affiliate sites, no MFA sites, content hand crafted by caring employees. Only one of my sites got hit, and the spots were replaced by absolute garbage. Adwords rep. took a long hard look and admitted nothing seemed out-of-wack on my site in terms of quality. So I started talking to other site owners in my industry. Basically, those who were hit shared the following behavior:1. aggressive optimization based on a conversion frontier, which often had us in spots 3-6 and almost never in spot 1.
2. huge gap between our CPC and that of the #1 positionWe were sniping bargains, and Google stood to gain by getting us out of the picture and putting more eyeballs on less efficient bidders. I think it's a good strategy, economically speaking, though time will tell whether calling it a quality score was a good move.
Tell me, do you fit the 2 attributes above?
I would say that is a somewhat fair comparison.
I'm a fanatical tester and I'll literally run 30 versions of a sales page to determine which one converts best. (although the one hit has been the same for some time)
My ads were also usually in the 2-5 spot for relevant keywords although I was first for a few.
As far as my relevance- my affiliate who is in first place is just linking straight to my page- so it's the same site!
That's why you got hit. They don't like sales pages. They're telling everyone what they want but it seems no one wants to listen or doesn't believe them.
Cleaning up the results by removing the arbitrage and irrelevant ebay ads would improve the "quality" much more than imposing googles view of landing page quality on all advertisers. If the changes were designed to remove arbitrage and irrelevant ads, it hasnt worked.
pdivi, what was your daily average PPC for your entire campaing(s)?
I think you said it best when you said you do 30 versions of your SALES page.That's why you got hit. They don't like sales pages. They're telling everyone what they want but it seems no one wants to listen or doesn't believe them.
What would I link to? Free encyclopedias? Links to Google's stock price? Another 5,000 ebay ads?
Yes, I have a business. I SELL stuff.
However, my sales page has a full contact, FAQ, and W3c compliant privacy policy. I have links to authority sites on products I sell as well as featuring news stories related to them. I also have a blog and RSS feed.
God forbid, someone using Adwords wants to sell something.
I guess my ad just needs to say "Find KEYWORD on ebay" and they'll let me run it.
I've ran the same site on Adwords for over 3 1/2 years. Full of good content, high PR, privacy policy, high conversion rates, etc.......
Getting around 1,000 to 1,500 clicks a day now down to 100 if I'm lucky.
Just have to try some new stratagies and yes start paying more to Yahoo and MSN and others.....
Kind of funny.....I just got my mini-fridge and this happened a week later..... nice.
heyday
Google doesn't see itself as being primarily a sales tool, they consider themselves an information tool. (Froogle was the sales tool, at one point) That might be why purely sales pages get tarred with the low quality brush.
Their billions in profit say otherwise.
I doubt advertisers spend millions per day to "spread information". Gimme a break.
I just got my mini-fridge and this happened a week later
Google is a tool, and if a tool isn't predictable, that's not good. I wouldn't want an electric drill which only turned clockwise on sundays for example.
I doubt advertisers spend millions per day to "spread information". Gimme a break.
But from the posts here, we're seeing people say that some advertisers who are spending large amounts (maybe not millions, but enough to get a refrigerator - which I, for one, have certainly never gotten in the past four years) and yet they've had their minimum bids raised to the point where they've been effectively booted out.
You're looking at it from an advertiser's point of view, and not Google's.
and yet they've had their minimum bids raised to the point where they've been effectively booted out.And yet G's earnings continue to increase. Is it because Adwords is such a new tool that new big customers are just finding out about it? No. Is it because the improvement to 'user experience' has been so awesome that searchers are spending more time on Google? No. Is it because all sorts of revenue is being created by products outside of Adwords? No way. Could it be that for every penny that was lost from the min. bid hikes, 2 pennies were created by diverting those clicks to less efficient bidders? Hmmm.
Google wants a bunch of PPC noobs bleeding money to have those top spots.
I've been advertising with Adwords since almost day one.
When I first started Adwords was CPM only, PPC was not even a term that anyone would have recognized then.
The small guys lifted them to the top and now they've kicked those people down the ladder.
They are a Super Efficient engine for the Big guys. Little guys just cannot play without matching a DELL budget.....
Google Adwords is all about selling things
No, it's not. Except for advertisers who can't see beyond their own small worlds. Google has explained what adwords and adsense are about, but more importantly, they've modified the serving of their ads to better meet the needs of their end users, the majority of whom are NOT shoppping, or buying when they click on ads.
There's you. There's google. You have your concerns. They have theirs. If you can't tell one set from the other, you won't understand what google is doing, AND, you simply won't be able to profit from it.
Your choices, I guess.
"Thousands of advertisers use our Google AdWords programme to promote their products; we believe AdWords is the largest programme of its kind. In addition, thousands of web site managers take advantage of our Google AdSense programme to deliver ads relevant to the content on their sites, improving their ability to generate revenue and enhancing the experience for their users."
The words "promote" and "Generate revenue" to me suggest that Google wants us to sell products, which is what we do, very well thank you!
The fact is that Luke seems to have suffered despite being a merchant and having worked hard to promote his promotional copy. Instead he is seeing affiliates and perhaps even Ebayesque ads still there, when he has been botted out!
So what you are saying is that people will use Adwords to piss money up against a wall just to get people to their site? You bang on about multi-variable functions and then you go and say something silly like this...
why...?
I guarantee it looks NOTHING like any of the pages belonging to the people complaining in this thread.
I'd be willing to bet that the quality score IS bringing about higher short-term revenue for G, however...and not because of anything having to do with user experience.
Here's something else to consider: on the Adsense side, publishers are reporting a lower CTR and a higher eCPM. What does that mean? Users are less interested in the ads, but advertisers are bidding more. Less relevance, higher bids, net result: more money. Quality my a**.
[edited by: pdivi at 4:42 pm (utc) on Nov. 16, 2006]
Hell, on the main page for Adwords it states
People can simply click your ad to make a purchase or learn more about you.
Please, whatever your agenda is, give people at least a bit of credit. Adwords is about advertising, hence the "Ad" in Adwords.
Advertising is about either selling something, or branding with the intent of selling later. Either way, it's about selling.
Which is why google altered the way they serve ads on their search results to reflect the reality that most people (the end users) aren't interested in purchasing. If you don't understand why google HAS to take into account the desire and intent of end users as part of a business strategy, then no amount of explaining will help you "get it".
Understanding Google's perspective business-wise will help you build and generate money making sites that don't get crushed by things like QS.
If you don't want to understand that, that's fine with me. It's your "business", and while you guys are complaining and muttering under your breath, there's a lot of "holier than thou" people who are doing very very well.
One thing I learned a long time ago. If you want to learn to succeed, pay attention to those who are and have succeeded, and not the people who are failing or have failed.
One thing I learned a long time ago. If you want to learn to succeed, pay attention to those who are and have succeeded, and not the people who are failing or have failed.
Taking that advice - you'll have ignored almost all of the greatest successes in history. Almost any successful person you talk to will say that they've had some major failure moments that they have learned a great deal from.
“Failure is the tuition you pay for success.” Walter Brunell
“The greatest barrier to success is the fear of failure.” Sven Goran Eriksson
