Sudden increase of CPC recently?

My campaigns are full of inactive keywords.

[fischermx]

I didn't review my campaigns since last week, I remember a campaign with arround 1000 keyword in which I had about 150 "inactive for search".
Today I have 750 "inactive for search"!

Does anybody get any similar to this recently?

[eyeinthesky]

Hi guys, some of my ad positions were affected yesterday but today they are back up there!

Looks like some kind of a roll back of the algo?

[DoingItWell]

I'm using both Adwords and Adsense, and I see the hikes in Adwords but no such increases in Adsense. So Google is getting a raise this way? I'm not familiar with the MSN or Yahoo keyword bid levels - is Google simply using this as a way to catch up with competitor keyword price levels?

[hughie]

I just came on to see what was up with adwords and found you're all noticing the same thing (good ole WW).

One of my major terms is asking for a minimum 22p per click, i'm running position 1.8 out of a full set of advertisers and yet when i go below 22p it blocks it asking to increase quality.... i'm getting an excellent CTR so surely that's a quality ad!

I used to pay 17-18p per click and hang around position 4-5, now it's impossible for me to appear there unless i lower the quality of my ad...

i'm a merchant and it seems my jumps aren't so significant as others.. it's still forced our daily spend up 50%, if only there was some quality competition out there!

[Elric99]

One of the problems is that google's system is so good to work with. Anyone who's tried Yahoo Search Marketing will know what I mean. It's a million years behind. If Yahoo had any sense they'd capitalize on these kinds of problems to take more market share.

I've not tried MSN yet. Has anyone seen good results with them?

[Nawaralsaadi]

This increase makes big business sense, at least in the long term, if google does not improve the quality of the landing pages, users will cease to click on those ads due to their poor targeting, it seems to me that google is witnessing a drop in the overall click through on their search ad network, thus the need to improve the ad quality to incite users to clicks the ads rather then click on the free organic listings.

Over the long term this should produce more revenues to Google through high users satisfaction and a high click through rate, while in the other hand google can continue to milk those with irrelevant landing pages for money through an extremely high price per click, which should compensate for some of the lost ad revenue on the short term from the effective blockage of thousands of advertisers.

Since google is a business, any change in their algorithm is designed to boost revenues for the future, remembering this would explain a lot of google moves

[hannamyluv]

What I think is sort of funny is nearly all that's left on the ad side now is shopping search engines, ebay and one or two megastores (amazon, taget, etc). Considering that there are, what... like 4 or 5 major shopping search engines so the block is filled.

They all look nice, but as a searcher, I am going to get darn frustrated to just have search engines or ebay and amazon to choose from. Plus those places spend soooo much time on crafting a quality ad, right?

If I were a merchant, I'd make sure all my shopping search engine ads were up to date. And we all know how affordable they are *rolls eyes*

[metrofeed]

It's amazing to me how crappy Yahoo's system is, as one of the comments above notes. They are literally leaving millions on the table! I am spending around $10k per month on AdWords, and would probably be able to spend about 1/2 of that on Yahoo, but the system is just so incredibly lame that everytime I go in there, I end up just getting frustrating and quitting.

As for the topic at hand, lately I have had some good success using Site Targettign rather then straight ahead cpc to bolster my campaigns and get an overall lower CPC. While search is by far the #1 way to acquire customers, when the prices start to rise, add some very carefully selected site targets, at very low CPM rates, and you might find, as I have, that it lowers the overall customer acquisition cost.

[drall]

I said it earlier in this thread and I will say it again, on the adsense publisher side we are seeing extremely large ctr increases across a large network of sites and several million visitors a month.

I believe this has to do with relevancy as G stated and not as much to do with increasing revenues, that as always with many G decisions is a byproduct and comes with the increase in relevancy which then increases clicks which in turn increases click happiness and blahblahblah.

As was pointed out earlier, G knows you cant afford the 5 or 10 buck clicks, it is a polite way of saying your landing page isnt what we want, please fix it so it doesnt say "Free vacation to Rome!" and then lead to a page about installing a toolbar for roman link spam.

[ConfusedWriter]

I'm sure that the rise in CPC is also due in part to their use of the landing page quality score. I've read this multiple times over the last couple weeks, and have heard of people being able to lower their bids again, once changes (astetics, content, etc) were made.

I have a suspicion that this isn't all dependent on a single theory, but multiple ones, even though it would be much simpler to swallow.

[wingslevel]

for a given keyword, does everyone get the same minimum cpc?