Sudden Steep Drop in AdWords Ad Prices

[potentialgeek]

Has anyone here seen a sudden drop in ad prices in the last week or two?

Publishers writing in the Adsense forum (we're on to six pages of discussions in one thread alone) have noticed sudden, unprecedented steep drops of 30-50% in the last few weeks, and we want to know if there is a comparable drop in ad prices for the Advertisers.

We'd like to know if Google is taking a bigger piece of the pie or if the data we see is a stat reporting glitch. The big revenue cuts occurred around the same time as Adsense channels experienced their first glitch. Have you seen any reporting discrepancies in your AdWords data, too?

p/g

[grigoroo]

I spend a lot of time tracking trends on my traffic and I haven't seen any unusual downward movement on ad rates overall, but did see a few temporary anomalies that appear to have passed. Nevertheless, I have not been especially confident in the stats I've seen over the last two week period. My first footnote on possible discrepancies was on 10/20. On the other hand, I also do some Adsense volume and have not seen any clear indication of a price drop.

[JS_Harris]

My top keyword went from having its norm of 15 to 17 million search results to 48 million results for three days just before the visible pagerank update. Since then it's been steady at 11 million results.

When it was at 48 million I experienced what you describe and my site was kicked back to page 7 of the results. Now that its down to 11 million and the site is back to the bottom of the first page/top of the second page and the values are back to normal.

Stuff like this makes me think that my site rank plays heavily in the payout. I rank well vs 11 million, not so well vs 48 million. CTR and bounce rate play a role on getting full value for sure.

[shorebreak]

There's not a single person I've talked to in the SEM world in the last few weeks who's mentioned anything about AdWords CPC's decreasing. In fact, the opposite is true in retail and finance.

Sounds like G's taking a bigger slice of the click pie.

[skibum]

Haven't noticed anthing on the advertiser side. Could it be that advertisers are bidding higher on search, taking funds away from content traffic because search conversions are going up and content is not?

[trinorthlighting]

Have to agree, more and more advertisers are getting away from the content network and swithing to Pay Per Action for content now. Even though we have less traffic, we are getting better quality converting traffic. No more content pay per click for us any longer and other advertisers (Which some spend millions a year) I know have also made the switch.