Does anybody get any similar to this recently?
Still I'm wating the explanation why a keywords with absolutely no advertisers in any country is asking a min bid of $10.00.
I did see that someone from Google visited my site recently and they went no further than my homepage and must have missed all the quality content and never visited a landing page. If this is how the quality check works then the system is doomed to failure.
Atomic,
You've hit the nail on the head, I believe. I have many domains. One domain Adwords hates, no matter what I advertise. Another similar looking site rarely gets the wild min CPCs.
Just realized on the hated domain, since I use it for so many diverse products, the homepage has no sitemap, no links to anything else. I've been using it only for Adwords so I figured who'd ever go to the homepage.
The other domains tend to have sitemaps and links to quality content. In fact I don't always keep them updated so oftentimes the landing pages won't be located from the sitemaps. Nonetheless Adwords doesn't overcharge on those.
Therefore, I'd say this answers Fischermx's question too. The so-called "quality check" is automated and starts at your home page, not the landing page in the ad. I'd venture to guess it arrives at a general "site" score based on the full range of the site.
Otherwise, how come when I'd put up an ad in a new folder on the "hated domain", Adwords knew right away to overcharge by 1000 percent? The landing pages weren't being checked. I think the assessments are done based on what can be found from the homepage. It would tie up Google's servers tremendously to visit your landing page every time you added a keyword, etc.
A one-time or ideally a periodic visit is made to the site and you are judged based on that forever after.
I could never figure out why that domain always fared so badly no matter what the content. In fact, over time I've moved a lot of content to other domains and away went the $10.00 CPCs.
Of course, this was after making sure I had no HTML errors, every image had a descriptive ALT tag, keywords and variants were included, etc. on the "hated domain". All in a vain attempt to improve my "quality score".
Atomic, does your home page link to all your quality landing pages?
Israel
Those of us that have seen campaigns basically die yesterday have unacceptable landing pages in the eyes of Google. Most likely due to too high of an ad-to-content ratio (i.e. more AdSense or affiliate ads on the page than content, or more than Google wants to see). I am going to try to increase my content to ad ratio and see if I can get un-marked for death. Of course then I will probably become unprofitable and have to stop bidding anyway...
There is certainly a random or at least misguided algo governing the bid requirements.
I've been going through some adgroups to do a "damage assessment" and found one where by accident, I had included the most irrelevant, vague keywords possible. They had no bearing on the product advertised. Their low bids were untouched and the keywords were showing in high positions.
Now this was all due to a poor copy/paste job. If these keywords were truly being judged on "quality" with regard to where they land you, I should have been charged $10.00 apiece for these. Any human evaluator would have said "You want to use these keywords to advertise that?" and charged accordingly.
In fact, they were so general in nature, they surely deserved a $10.00 bid, but Google is showing them in the top 5 positions for 25 cents. Something is out of whack there!
At least searchers had the sense not to click on them....
Israel
arrgggggghhhhhh
Atomic, does your home page link to all your quality landing pages?
But while my homepage may not go directly to each landing page, my second-level category pages which are in my navigation all link to my landing pages. There is no funny business here.
Oh yeah, and bidding on my own domain is now going to cost me a freaking dollar when no one else is bidding on it? I can't stand it when the Google information ministers come out to tell us everything is fine while missles and bombs are falling.
Do we look that stupid?
If you accept their minimum bid, does anyone know if the actual CPC comes out that high?
I can't imagine Google would purposefully make such a drastic change overnight - it would seem an inopportune time for them considering the concurrent ramp-up of MSN's competitive product (which has substantial traffic on the same keywords at minimum CPCs similar to what levels were at Google before the hike in price). I would gather MSN is loving this - if these prices stick, everyone is going to leave Google and move over to MSN.
Some of us are discussing the same issue in a thread over here: [tinyurl.com...]
And that would be a big YES, at least in my case.
