Does anybody get any similar to this recently?
Atomic: I don't use Google Analytics and I was hit by this. how do I fit into this?
G$$gle collected enough conversion data, apparently. So they jacked prices where they saw opportunity to take $$$ away from advertisers - on the best converting keywords. Whether you used Analytics or not is now irrelevant, we are all in one boat, and it ain't the same G$$gle is in.
Wlauzon: Google does NOT set the prices...If a keyword goes from .20 to .90, it was NOT Google that raised the price - it was all of those bidding against you for position that raised the price.
And I'd like to get some of whatever you're smoking. Possibly "G$$gle-happy grass"? :)
It is clearly software-jacked prices (or more like someone pressed big red "HIKE PRICES" button), there IS NO WAY some advertiser came in and jacked prices 10x accross the board. You'd need $ Billions (with a B) to do that. Other fluctuations didn't affect it like that in the past.
bradical, definitely beat up a path to your account manager.
* In very competitive niches, this (price hikes) has already been done in the past. Can't pinpoint actual date though, didn't pay attention.
* In competitive niches, price hikes happened this time around (a few days back, when this thread has started).
* In semi-competitive niches, I see some, but not so many keywords being disabled.
* In non-competitive niches, nothing is hiked, prices stayed the same.
From this I can make only one conclusion - G$$gle analyzed conversion data from "free" ANALytics, and desided they can get MORE MONEY for most competitive keywords. There's no other viable, logical conclusion that can come out of it.
Can someone who runs campaigns across multiple niches concur/deny this?
G$$gle-happy crowd, please stay out of this
First, our situation:
The major campaign that was affected was basically an affiliate ad campaign. We, however, use our own display URL and have our own landing page at that URL where we offer more info than the merchant (actually more relevant to each KW) and have better optimized our landing pages for our audience.
And the response:
The specialist suggested that we eliminate using our URL and take users directly to the merchant site (which is less relevant, and converts at about a 15% worse rate).
We're going to be testing this on a small scale to see if (and how much) it improves things... but perhaps it sheds some light on the changes that were implemented. I know it's not all affiliates that are affected by this, but it seems like they are trying to get rid of what they percieve to be "dummy URLs" that act as a doorway to another site. Which definitely does make some sense from their perspective.
So Google hiked my bid prices so I land #1 - I don't necessarily care or want to be #1, but that is the minimum I must bid or go inactive. So pray tell how is one supposed to deal with that?
Makes a lot of sense, Abagail. At your current bid (or mine for that matter), the page wasn't worthy of showing in Adwords at all because of its poor quality.
Once you raise the bid, your ad goes right into the coveted #1 "hot spot" -- where only the ads with superior CTRs were supposed to go. Even though we didn't do a darn thing to our pages. I guess I'm not smart enough to understand, but it all makes sense, right?
Israel
Correct me, if I am wrong, but, does Google Adwords not have a rule about direct linking to the merchant's site - something like only 1 per keyword, something like that?
The rule is that only one ad for a particular domain may show for each search.
So if several bidders want to send ads to ExampleMerchant.com, the one with the highest "whatever" will show for each given search.
Meaning sometimes yours may be the one to show, sometimes one of the others using that domain as their destination URL will show.
Whether it's practical to do that depends on how many others have the same idea and how good a CTR/CPC, etc. your ad can manage.
Yours may always show if you can beat out any others, may never show or sometimes show depending on the above factors as well as the budget you and the others allowed for their ad.
Israel
Today I created an ad using a landing page on a
domain that is Not in Google's index -- it had been
dropped quite some time ago. All the keywords
required either $5 or $10 CPC.
I copied the Exact Same landing page to a domain that
Is in the index at PR 4.
Voila ... the lowest CPC to activate the keywords
was .03 - .04 with some as low as .02! And, the
funny thing is, when I hit "save the ad" I hadn't
even FTP'd the new page to the indexed domain yet ...
I had just changed the Domain name in the ad!
This Is Not happening with Brand New Domains (to me
anyway), though. Because I created a few ads on
Brand New domains and the required CPC's were normal
running between .02 - .10.
So, this "new" algo seems to be linked with the
ousting of domains from the index -- possibly?
Who knows? It will probably change tomorrow.
if PageRank of the landing page is tied to quality score, then I may know what happened... Just a theory.
My ads were linked to http://example.com/directory instead of http://www.example.com/directory/index.html
The bots do not recognize any PageRank when looking at http://example.com/directory (which is the same page of course as http://www.example.com/directory/index.html). The latter, full version however is a PageRank 7.
I wonder that if I had done my links the other way (with the www prefix and the index.html), the bots would have recognized the pagerank, thereby formulating a higher quality score, thereby not disabling the ads and asking for high minimum cpc's?
Just a theory.
[edited by: eWhisper at 12:02 pm (utc) on April 14, 2006]
[edit reason] Please use example.com for sample links [/edit]
Apart from the one post from AWA, the silence is deafening. Manx - however - you are a genius.
Here's another problem. Many adwords campaigns use tracking URLS (and some have to link into session variable URLS). Aren't these going to have ludicrously low landing page quality scores potentially? I guess not, if Google only tracks the user habits after click through based on how long it takes for a searcher to click on the next result in the list, but if they are trying to track the user habits through other means as well (Google analytics, Toolbar, ISP data, spy satellite...) then they could be getting false negatives.
