Message:
We've simplified our keyword status system.
Your keywords will now either be active (triggering ads) or inactive (not triggering ads). Quality remains the most important factor in your keywords' performance. Each keyword will now have a minimum bid that is based on the quality of your keyword and ad text. If your maximum CPC doesn't meet this minimum bid, your keyword will be listed as inactive.
What you should do differently:
If a keyword is listed as inactive, improve its quality through optimization, delete it, or raise that keyword's maximum CPC to the minimum bid indicated. (Raising the bid will re-activate the keyword.) If your keyword is active, you don't need to do anything.
those that are complaining and only spend $200/mo on advertising need a reality check. each month we spend $7,000 on advertising,. but guess what? in return we make 8x that.
Thanks for your reply. My previous post was unclear to say the least. I guess really have two questions. First: Are there factors that are not "relevency" factors in play? (just calling something a "relevency" factor doesn't necessarily make it so. For example one type of factor that has nothing to do with relevence of the ad, is too just set a minimum charge for a particular category such as "financial services". Is anything like this happening with the new algo?
The second question is: Are there any circumstance where a more relevent keyword or more relevent ad is actually charged more because its more relevent? This could account for the multiple examples of precise phrases [small blue domestic widget parts] being charged more than the broadmatch widgets .
In my own account I am seeing [precise phrases] with a 7% CTR having a higher minimum bid set than the 1.5% CTR broad match keyword. Both point to the same ad. Hard to imagine how that precise ad could be less relevent than the broadmatch ad.
Thanks in advance for any help.
Those that are complaining and only spend $200/mo on advertising need a reality check. each month we spend $7,000 on advertising,. but guess what? in return we make 8x that.
webnoob, you're the one who needs a reality check. Just because you make a return of 8x doesn't mean ever can or need to make that much. Moreover it is because of a few people like you who make this much return or atleast who claim to make this much return, is Google raising the CPCs through such means.
now try justifying to yourself that you have to look up thousands and thousands of individual phrases to make sure which ones are, and arent working
*grumbles*
I don't get it. We have one popular keyword that we have spent over $7000 on, all at the minimum nickel bid (before the change that you said you thought we would really like).
We left our bid at 5 cents and now it's inactive calling for us to increase to 10 cents ... and here's the biggie ... a quick search at Google shows not a single ad for this keyword.
Google loses revenue, Adsense publishers lose revenue and we lose revenue.
Help me understand who is helped and how? I just don't get it.
Example, ads that had gone back to .05 as the norm for them before the change are now back to $1 clicks this AM. Do i have to readjust the minimum each day to keep live and protect the costs?
We were the only advertiser on a particular keyword, advertising for 0.5p - first position, great.
New minimum bid system kicks and say we have to place a minimum bid of 0.55p. Fair enough, I thought we would give it a go - since we where the only advertiser there I thought we would only be charged 0.05p or so.
I check today and we are now bidding against another competitor - GOOGLE!
Images.google.com are running an advert, and are now pushing our bid through the roof. I wonder how much they are paying?
This is only one example that the new system is is nothing more than a scam.
I would love and explaination for the above - but in the mean time I will be removing all overpriced adverts esp. when google decides to compete!
Vote with your money people.
Suddenly my usual, high ranking ads got bashed down. These are ads for highly bidded (more than $2), relevant keywords and now they are ranked below ads that are not relevant to the keywords at all.
I can't believe people are bidding more than $2 for these irrelevant keywords. They can't have a high CTR because they aren't there before this change.
This whole thing really baffles me...
I just realized I can change bids to below 5 cents. I set a bunch of them to 2 cents. Then using the filter to select 'inactive' keywords I set those to 3 cents and on up to my personal limit. a lot of work.
Same here. And two hours later more than half of my keywords had become inactive. How are we supposed to manage those minimum CPCs?
I have been able to activate 90% of the disabled keywords and they are still running. Although I have to say that the logic of some of the minimum bids excapes me (Broad is indeed often cheaper than exact), I have only seen a handfull of ludicrous minimum prices, the rest was only a few cents over the max.
All in all this seems a good move which brings management cost down and which takes case of the "keyword status mess" of the last year or so.
I'm pretty sure we will find out soon enough what parameters determine the minimum, as most of the smart Adwords folks are hanging around here :)
And two hours later more than half of my keywords had become inactive
In other words, in order to keep your KW list active, you should check up on changes in the account every few hours? Or, they wish, I should just slam that 0.10 on most of KWs..? I don't think so..
Or just to forget about everythink and come back in a week or so when everything settles (if ever)?
Anybody else experiencing this for the first time since the new keyword system was launched?
Our spend for the first 7.5 months of the year is in the $100K to $200K range. After trimming a whole lot of fat, we're down to under 40K keywords in all campaigns combined. The message persists.
I used to have more than triple the keywords without issue.
I'd really like to reactivate some old, highly effective but disabled keywords, but the system won't let me.
"The keywords in your account are nearing an unmanageable size."
Anybody else experiencing this for the first time since the new keyword system was launched?
I've been living with that message since Feb 2005. We each appears to have keyword limits for our accounts. Older accounts seem so have a 50k limit, newer accounts seem stuck at 15k. I'm willing to bet 100k a month spenders are given more leeway there.
You can request that your limit be upped and they may or may not grant it (probably not). Otherwise, the message appears to do no harm. It goes away if I go below 43,999 keywords then comes back when I exceed that.
Although I can exceed 50k during an "add keywords", the next time I attempt to add words (now being over 50k), they're just thrown away with a cryptic error message returned.
Since you asked....
patient2all
The formerly 5 cent words that had wanted a dollar seem to be active now with no message. I'm assuming they are showing. If it was earlier in the day, I'd do some testing.
So let's relax for the rest of the weekend.
patient2all
I'm hoping that the Budget Optimi[zs]er will help keep an eye on all those keywords for me rather than me having to manually monitor/adjust them.
So far, the combination of BO (!), and the new AW scheme has not hurt me at all, but we'll have to wait until all the advertisers and publishers stop thrashing around so that we can see some steady-state behaviour (well, as near as AS/AW can ever get to that!).
Rgds
Damon
Until I've just added some new listings..
I put 120 tightly focussed keywords into a new adgroup and everyone was immediately inactive, I bid £0.10p inially and I know the keywords are probably in the 0.08p to 0.25p range, but now it's requesting I bid between 0.55 and £2.75
The top bidder on Overture is paying 0.26p a click and Google expects me to bid £2.75 just to get active.. It's not gonna happen Googleguys it's just impossible.
Hmm guess where this campaign will be going now.. number 1 on overture or number whatever on google at 12 times the price..
Overture here I come! Google have dropped the ball on this.. boy have they F*&^£d up this time.. Quality score my A$$
Shane
Quality score my A$$
Zakly
-Dr.X
And the most important one: I have increased a keyword to 0.40 to become active just for a test and unchecked "search network" to become only appear at websites. When I went Google and made a search, it appeared! Wouldn't it appear only on the websites? :)
Additionally, I was the only advertiser for that keyword, so why is this 0.40 for?
I was the only advertiser for that keyword, so why is this 0.40 for?
Teaser,
That's the question of the week.
Now my question is: If you are indeed the only advertiser for that term on a search and someone clicks will you pay the full 40 cents or something less?
patient2all
It looks to me that adwords, not Adwords anymore, is trying to test our willingness to raise our bid on complex KW phrases that he knows were pretty profitable for us (probably from conversion statistics which may not be in the new algo but surely helped drawing it)
Keep your bids low if you can... and boycot conversion info (even tho it is probably too late for most products)
I hope the market will regain control for to me it is the only thing that can calculate a min cpc! and adw will just have helped us diversify on other ppc engines d :) b
cheers
Funny you mentioned complex phrases. Although I've been fortunate to not suffer yet in the pocketbook (though individual campaigns have gone all but dead), I'm in the process of migrating some AdGroups to those other PPCs.
I'm noticing an interesting trend. Most any phrase that contains the term "one and two" or "one & two" is flagged for a very high bid, regardless of what campaign of mine it is in or what context it is used in. Wonder what the logic (if any) is behind that?
patient2all
We target mainly content... Our conversion rates had been 1.58 to 1.75% and then all of the sudden they are down to 0.25%
In over two years we have never seen it this low. It appears that we are getting a ton of garbage traffic all of the sudden...
Let's see what happens the next few days...
heyday
You bet your b*ttom!
*sigh*
I have a kw for which I am the only advertiser and they want $5.00 from me!
Like those who have already posted, shut off their damn tracking.
