I run numerous campaigns for clients and until the changes I was more than happy to accept that if a keyword didn't get enough clicks by the threshold of impressions then it didn't deserve to stay enabled. What I now have are campaigns full of disabled keywords that haven't even had one impression.
As an example, a client, who is a business consultant (turns businesses around) had 'overwork advice' as a broad match set up. The thinking was that if a business owner was overworking then they may type in a phrase including those 'overwork advice' words. At that time, my client would have been the only advert showing because no-one else was competing. And yet, within no time at all, that keyword phrase became disabled.
Under the 'old' system, that phrase would have been given a chance and only disabled after a certain time. So my client is unable to have that phrase and there are no competitors at all - my client loses out, Google lose out from no revenue, and people searching for such queries don't have the opportunity to be helped due to the natural Google results being non-relevant in many cases. Now let's look at Overture - I could set up 'overwork advice' in there as there's still no competition (try typing it into Yahoo) and my client would gain those leads for minimal cost and wouldn't have any of the hassle they've had from Google. The only problem being (I think, I'm not great on Overture) is that they can't target the UK market only (as they've no interest in visibility outside the UK).
From the view of my clients (all small businesses), who want me to find the search terms that will gain them leads, Google used to be fantastic. We filled blank advertising space or got first page results, Google got some revenue, and the client got their leads. Now, all my clients are going mad because they can't understand why Google would stop them from having a chance to at least get to a certain number of impressions before disabling a keyword phrase (whereas it was possible before). Instead, all they're now seeing are a mass of ebay and amazon adverts that are mostly non-relevant to what's in the mind of the person typing the search query.
I'm interested in opinions - to me, it appears that Google are happy to shut out the small business market by playing god and disabling keywords immediately, based, I presume on algorithms. What will happen? My clients will use Overture etc., will instead concentrate on 'normal' search engine optimisation (which generates Google no revenue at all), and they'll start to drift towards Googles competitors to do searches because they'll view Google as having lost the plot.
I only spend about £2,000 a month with Google on Adwords on behalf of my clients, but it's still a fair amount of money. As things stand, my clients aren't picking up on business from those little gem keywords that no-one else thought of because they're instantly disabled, so they're demanding to know why they, as the advertiser don't have a choice in what keywords are used.
I'm wondering whether Google will backtrack on this new way of doing things because in my view, it's going to kill their business as people like me become disillusioned and pull my clients out of Adwords and into something else. But I'll keep an open mind if anyone has any thoughts on this subject?
[edited by: OlRedEye at 3:08 am (utc) on Dec. 24, 2004]
Go to Google now and type: ABC Company and you'll see no Sponsored Links. If your company was called ABC Company you'd want to be displayed there but as things stand, (and I've found this to be true on several occasions), Google will take a judgement call that ABC Company is not worthy of being a keyword term and so it will be disabled before it even reaches one impression. So how is ABC Company to raise it's profile when it can't even do the most basic thing and be listed under its company name?
Google have got some serious problems with the way they're ignoring those of us who want to have the choice of setting up numerous keyword terms (but also accept that they'll be disabled after XXX impressions if the CTR isn't adequate). Even just to modify this current rule up to about 200 impressions would be enough to prove that CTR's are possible. On a company name itself, the CTR would be very high so Googles judgement call on whether it would be successful or not is totally flawed.
Rant over, Christmas is here - computer off, tv on, alcohol chilling .... chill!
I've switched off the content, only search. Might that be a/the reason? Content converts far worse than ads on the search results, as far as I see. But might be that google does not like that..
-change the match type
-change the copy
-change the url
and you'd get 1k more impressions to prove your keyword's worth.
now - as far as what Google tells me - once a keyword is disabled on a certain match type - it's done. kaput. at an account level. anyone have thoughts on the truth of this statement?
I'm also in a 'small business' environment. However, I have not been affected at all these last two months. Some six/eight months ago I experimented further with kw's because ctr, etc were performing poorly; basically I went deeper into specific terms that people might be interested in and which were industry/sector specific.
After some initial success, and a good few failures, I focused even more on the niche elements of my sector(s). Then I went dynamic. This has been superb. It stops any misguided impressions through misinterpretation by the searcher; the kw combinations I now use are so industry specific there can be no confusion. All clicks are relevant...
By the same token I still use broad match in some instances. These, again, are specific solely to my sector(s) - and they work.
The kw for adword success is now 'focus'. You must focus on your target market and take a niche approach. This will eventually kill off all those merely using the dictionary as their kw base - and it will happen. In the meantime, unfortunately, G is penalising all its clients with sets of rules & algo's that it itself cannot explain...
This is obviously just a transition phase as far as G and the adwords phenomenon is concerned - I wonder what's next...
Syzygy
I have had no success bringing "broad match" or "phrase match" keywords back to life once they have been disabled or have accumulated a bad history....
Exact match is another story.. this is ok....
Can anyone else comment this?
