Have you reached your AdWords pain threshold?

Has your AdWords ROI crossed over into the red?

[pdivi]

I didn't think it would happen, but it finally did...

After the big April minimum bid hike, my partner and I invested gobs of effort in creating new landing pages that Google might interpret as more "relevant". Not only do the new pages not convert as well, but they failed to have any impact whatsoever on reducing our inactive keywords. After stepping back, looking at diminished ROI along with all the time & energy we spend decoding AdWords mysteries, it finally struck us;
We are better off pausing AdWords completely and diverting the time, energy and money to content development, SEO and other ad networks. AdWords has fallen to the bottom of the barrel in terms of ROI for us.

How the mighty have fallen...at least for my company. Anyone else hit this point?

[rbacal]

Yes. The issue for me is the TIME issue, a little more than ROI itself. Experimentation for the content network is basically impossible due to the time it takes for ad approval. Coupled with the amount of effort required to test, retest, write new ads, try image ads, site targeting, and it's simply not worth it. The fact that they seem to accept MFA junk sites has really soured us, too.

If all I did was on the Internet, I'd probably think differently, but I have other non-Internet related projects and income that I've decided are a better way to spend my time rather than to read Google's minds on anything anymore

Will probably try MSN when and if they get their problems sorted.

[hdpt00]

It certainly has gotten much harder and ROI has gone down a lot!

[queenbee]

Yes. We've hit the same wall and are now working quickly towards alternate ad options.