Does anybody get any similar to this recently?
Bye bye stock market darling, it was nice while it lasted but with no new blood coming into the income stream you are a dinosaur, time to look for a new trophy stock, you are old and a bit ugly.
I could definitely believe that with increases of say $0.10 to $0.15-0.20.
... and even that is too much! Think about that, we're talking about 50% to %100 increase of your costs. Who on earth give a 50%/100% increase on any product these days?
They really messed up, because must of us didn't rise our bids. So they ended up losing money. A slight but generalized massive increase in the cents range would have a bigger effect in earnings to them since most people would just increase the bids without too much complain.
G now has enough of a base that tossing out what they deem as "undesirables" from a paying program is something they feel they can afford to do.
That is how big G is now. They don't care about you or your money. They get enough money from nice looking sites from good neighborhoods. (aka ebay, shopzilla, dealtime, etc)
We basically stopped advertising on this new site; last week a Google rep. called me to try and get us to resume bidding on this account. That kind of shoots down your theory that they don't need money from smaller advetisers. And this is in a very competitive industry - not one they need to grow.
I firmly believe this comes down to an image thing. They don't want their ads associated with crappy looking sites. That's why the big doorway type sites don't get hit. They look nice and don't give the ads a bad rep.
I think it does have to do with human intervention. I think for awhile now they have had people looking at a small group of sites and determining what unconcious factors make them like it or not, then introducing it into the algo on a larger scale.
And I also think this is testing ground for the organic side.
The reps wouldn't have a clue. G wouldn't trust them to decide if a site is "worthy". They depend on the sales reps to get the people in and then weed the bad ones out later with an automated process.
I have been using the conversion tracking in my account but wasn't able to set it up properly for my second account for quite sometime.. when the theory above came about, I immediately looked at my account, it could be coincidence but best converting keywords on my first account is at $5/$10 range.. my second account is at $1/$2 but doesn't have conversion tracking at all...
now another interesting thing is I have a different set of campaigns for other industries and these didn't get affected as the others, they never had a conversion tracking in place since they were started...
I think the conversion data could be derived from all the bidders that provided the conversion data then they would decide ok, these are the keywords that converts... whoever is willing to pay a premium we can show those... this also means better quality for the end users because history says other people took action. "Better revenue for us, better experience for end users fewer choices, also better for those willing to pay higher, less competitors" win-win? hehe...
could be all coincidence. although we can't really completely dismiss it.
am not too happy but not too sad about this... google is becoming a smaller percentage of my advertising budget.. since its so frickle minded.. we can't spend all the time baby sitting it.. we got better things to do like building real business..
ConfusedWriter: can you tell me why my keywords have increased 10x, but I do not used Analytics?
It doesn't matter now that you didn't use Analytics. What matters is that hundreds of clueless webmasters and equal number of business-challenged managers desided to give away a farm (all their conversion statistics) to G$$gle. G$$gle has the data now, and they can up the prices to make it a cash cow. It is irrelevant now whether you did it or not.
It may be too late, yet I'd seriously urge anyone using Analytics on their sites to IMMEDIATELY REMOVE IT, for the sake of their business.
etr06: It's not tightening screws and shrinking my margins - they're putting me out of business!
hannamyluv: G now has enough of a base that tossing out what they deem as "undesirables" from a paying program is something they feel they can afford to do.
Finally, someone started to notice. If you built your business on buying cheap G$$gle traffic, be prepared to start receiving Social Security checks. G$$GLE IS PUTTING YOU OUT OF BUSINESS, for giving away their data.
ConfusedWriter: "Danny Sallivan: If so, they might decide to up minimum bids"
There's no more "might", they already did.
Moderators, I seriously think this topic deserves front page.
If you built your business on buying cheap G$$gle traffic
I don't think is an issue either. It's actually not in G's best interest to jack up prices. New people wouldn't sign on if the word got out that you couldn't get a KW for less than $1. There is plenty of .05 (or less) KWs left. This is actually a process to keep those slots open for new advertisers.
G also can not afford to openly ban sites that are not "aesthetically" pleasing as it might discourage new advertisers from signing on. It's much better to get someone on board then dump them later than to scare off a perfectly good customer.
But on a side note, while I don't think they are using conversion data to determine bids (too much they don't know, mainly operating costs and cost of goods) I do think it's a bad idea to let them have it on principle.
Seriously though, every theory someone has appears to have a counter argument. For example, to the person that said google only wants the big time advertisers. Then why would they introduce their new "quick start" program aimed at small mom and pop retailers.
Or the argument that google is now using covnersion data to increase CPC on the great keywords. Once again, this does not add up either since the logic would say they would increase the CPC to just barely being profitable, but it seems like they have made it totally unprofitable.
