Although I know some of you people like the Adwords update, I get the impression most of you have serious problems with it. It probably won't be much help, but I feel the need to share my thoughts about it with you.
I for instance am completely lost here. I used to have hundreds of keywords that did just fine at 0.05 to 0.10.
Now Big G wants to charge me up to 5.00 for the very same keywords. I simply can not believe these new prices are the result of some smart dynamic bidding algorithm cause no matter what I do (deleting all keywords, saving adgroups, re-entering the keywords), after a few hours Google sets most of my keywords back to these ridiculously high prices, and they are always the same fixed prices. It gets even weirder, entire groups of hundreds of slightly related keywords all have the same price! If the G algo is based upon some sort of dynamic free market bidding:
- prices of keywords should fluctuate instead of being fixed for days;
- different keywords should have different prices;
- and prices of keywords should have some sort of relation to their market value.
The result of the update is that my Adwords spendings have come down by about 75% for the last few days. I am only a little guy but I think no matter the size of your business, nobody aint gonna pay 4.14 for the keyword "blue widget for sale somewhere in the north of nebraska". (Serious! Just try it yourself!)
My guess is big G has made some mistakes in the new bidding system, and I sure hope the guys and girls at G's HQ are now working their *ss off to fix this problem, and I wish them all the best in doing so. For the sake of our businesses and the future of Big G, I sure hope they manage to do so before folks at Wallstreet are going to wake up.
My secret tip for the youngsters at big G is this.
Try deleting the code in your algo that says:
"If advertiser bid < 0.05"
"Then set minimum bid at ridiculous price"
"If advertiser bid => 0.05"
"Then multiply ridiculously high minimum bid by 100"
Hope not to offend you with this, was just kidding.
Again, wish all you advertisers and the people at big G all the best in the days to come. All I hope for is that the advertisers and big G can continue their relationship in a way that everyone is happy about...
I had about 30% of my programming specific keywords get a mininum cpc of 10c... ok I could live with that so I set all of those inactives to 10c.
Two days later I look at the keyword list and see that 25% of the 10c keywords now require a mininum cpc of 20c - that's a 100% increase incase you didn't notice (G!). 10c was the absolute max I'd can pay for these keywords so now my daily spend has gone from $400 to $225. Visitors and revenue have dropped by a equal %.
By the way, I'm the only one bidding on a majority of these 20c keywords.
<added>
counting decrease in spend and revenue G is losing around $600 per day from me alone.
In the end, if Adwords' weird system eventually stabilizes, it'll be a site's bottom line return on investment (ROI) which determines whether it's worth paying what Google demands. Enough clicks better convert to actual sales to make it worthwhile.
my daily spend has gone from $400 to $225.
counting decrease in spend and revenue G is losing around $600 per day from me alone.
If you were spending $400.00, even if you drop adwords completetly, how would google lose $600.00!?
I don't mind to learn math again if needed :)
I guess the difference between the drop in advertising and the $600 figure is the estimated revenue share for Google from adsense that runs on the site of the advertiser. (no-one knows the precise amounts on adsense but you can have a good guess if you have similar ads over your entire site)
