Does anybody get any similar to this recently?
My advice is to sit tight for a little while longer!
Google says they want affiliates to produce their own landing pages with quality content, and now they want us to go directly to the e-commerce sites. Well, which is it?
If in April, those same campaigns had the same CT's at the now elevated kwd rates, I will (or would) be spending $4,300.00 based on the last 30 days cost per click.
That is an enormous increase. Not quality, landing page this, or relevance that, etc. It is just a plain old "Google needs more cash" because they are in the quarter to quarter reporting race, even though they say they are not.
Also, the last 4 weeks conversions have been equivalent to the FIRST 4 weeks when I started to use google. Shifting more to MSN, and looking at post cards (good retention).
My findings are exactly the same - CPC prices for my industry are up over 60% in the last 30 days compared to
Nov 05 - Jan 06.
After cursing Google for the past couple days, I'm now ready to take a look at what I can do to get my ads running again. (without raising my bids to the unreasonable minimums.) Like many of you my "disabled" keywords were performing with very high CTRs, most of the keywords are in the adcopy of the ads, and the keywords are also found on my landing pages and are relevent to my content and services. So if this is all about a Quality Score then I'm led to believe that it is my site that has failed to impress Google.
Since I can't meet Google's minimum bids I have resolved to improve my site's quality score. So my question now is:
If I make significant changes to my site all with the aim of increasing the "quality", when will Google come back and scan the site for this measure again? If I have to wait a month or more I'm gonna go broke! (and that is assuming the quality score would even increase!)
And just as a side note: I first noticed the increased minimum bids on the 5th. For some important keywords I decided to raise my bid and get my ads showing again. However on the 6th, the very same keywords were again "disabled" and the minimum bid was even higher!?
I have to agree with many others here... if the bids are going to skyrocket suddenly like this there needs to be more transparency. Google says our options are to either raise the bid, or optimize. But what exactly needs to be optimized? They're going to have to give more detail on a case by case level. I used to hate Overture's picky human editing, now I long for it.
OK there are sites that don't impress Google - but there are ways and means of communicating this to us!
I really believe if you don't sell a product or at least give excellent reviews Google doesn't want to know you. Though when I hear on this thread that actual ecommerce sites are seeing higher minimum clicks I put my hand up and say that what message Google is sending - it isn't very clear!
Google continues its war on affiliates, which just forces me to advertise directly to the e-commerce site. Odd. But in that rarefied air at the Googleplex, they can look down their noses at us. They don't want our money, we're not big enough players for them to be concerned with us.
I'm still holding out that this was a mistake on their part, and not some backhanded way to not-so-subtley put us out of business.
