At least this time Google is giving a heads up.
That being said, I agree with you. I have a hard time believing they expected these changes to do this amount of damage, so when they notice their income dropping dramatically over the next few days, I have a feeling they're going to be a little more flexible on reverting back.
I'm just hoping that happens. Way too many big spenders were hit for them not to notice a dip in profits over this.
We realize that some minimum bids may be too high to be cost-effective -- indeed, these high minimum bids are our way of motivating advertisers to either improve their landing pages or to simply stop using AdWords for those pages
The impression from the above quote from the adwords blog, as well as my adwords rep who simply shrugged it off as no big deal is that they really think this is an improvement, so don't look for it to change anytime soon.
Unfortunately, that also means we've been effectively priced out of google (nothing like losing a couple hundred grand in income annual overnight)....but luckily, they've still go eBay to cater to ;-)
the only people who probably know whats going on are the engineers and the higher ups.
I don't have a rep, are they really just shrugging this off? That's not good
They have the last two times and the threads the last two times were twice as long. There will be no rollback. There will be no help from your reps. They do not want nor need your money.
The clicks that were going to your sites will simply go to the few sites left up. They don't loes out at all in the short term.
It does look like many, many more merchants were affected this time (as opposed to affiliates). That's not good for word of mouth.
If you want me to improve my site/content for the user then check my site after I have done it and allow me to advertise with a reasonable cost per click!
If things are this bad at the end of September, I'm definitely going to try to listen in to the earnings call in October.
I'm just a tiny AdWords advertiser, but I'd like to commend you big advertisers that are in the 4-5 figure per day range and are sticking to your guns (although it doesn't sound like G is going to give you a choice) and going to investigate other ad networks. It seems that the only option Google has left everyone with is to vote with their feet.
I just tried adding some nonsense keywords to my ad groups. all $5 or $10 min. spend.
Just like some other keywords which (I) thought were relevant, oh well.
I'm just a tiny AdWords advertiser, but I'd like to commend you big advertisers that are in the 4-5 figure per day range and are sticking to your guns (although it doesn't sound like G is going to give you a choice) and going to investigate other ad networks. It seems that the only option Google has left everyone with is to vote with their feet.
Not much choice at this point. Truly strong PPC campaigns take
months/years to filter and refine to maximum profitability. It's one thing to manipulate a site out of the free serps, it's something else altogether to destroy what amounts to thousands of man-hours of marketing research and customer acquisition processes in a matter of hours.
What, do you suppose, would happen if a major fortune 500 company were to suddenly discover that their primary source of customer acquisition had experienced and overnight cost increase exceeding 7000%? Do you think GM, Honda, or Toyota would be able to pass that cost onto the customer (as my less-than-informed adwords rep suggested), or do you think they would go under?
It is unfortunate (and, I might say, unethical) the flippant attitude that has been exhibited to me and other long-term adwords advertisers in regards to this sudden change.
In essence, the exhaulted adwords team is asking adwords merchants to:
1. Increase the "quality" of a page/site without knowing the standards to which must be met to be deemed "quality" (the vague instructions on their site not withstanding).
and/or
2. Throw any and all business sense out the window and allow them to increase ad rates so high as woudl neccessitate us charging $110 for an item tha only yesterday was $14. Think the customer's will mind us passing on that little price hike?
I never thought I would long for the day when Microsoft would start bundling msn search with vista....now it couldn't come too soon.
Even if they charged $20k for a $10k car with the attitude "We don't mind losing a few small dealers in order to filter out the bad ones from the good ones". I'm sure that would go over real well. I'm surprised so many people just shrug off what Google just did like it's nothing. I know many people here aren't shrugging, but those at Google seem to be.
Agreed! I read this on the Official Google AdWords blog, and called my account rep at Google as a preemptive measure. We went over my Account, Campaigns, Ad Groups, Keywords and Landing Pages. He agreed that our websites offers unique and quality content and that we should NOT have a problem.
The next morning, I awoke to see many of my keywords inactive for search. They wanted me to bid $10.00 for our most profitable and popular keywords.
This Algorithm Updated is Flawed!
Prima Facie Evidence is the fact our rep reviewed our site---before the update was implemented---and found nothing wrong with our setup. I trust a human more than a computer to make this kinds of judgements, so the algorithm must be flawed.
[edited by: RockSolidWes at 2:40 am (utc) on July 12, 2006]
If they could fix the two main problems
1) buggy product
2) not enough traffic
they could really take a serious bite out of google after this fiasco (I lost 2 high CTR high conversion campaigns. They are already on MSN too but just the thought of trying to edit them makes me nauseous and they get less than a quarter of the adwords traffic).
Who knows, maybe overture can come back from the (half) dead this Fall?
If I had it my way, I would return to the days before this Quality Score farce started. Its ruined the predictability and dependability of advertising. As some have pointed out, it takes thousands of hours of pruning and thousands of invested dollars to get your campaign where you want it to be. Now Google has ruined that in ONE DAY. I would be willing to shut off my google advertising for a week if it would help.
This was a reputable client selling real services, NOT an arbitrager or an affiliate. They had recently redesigned their landing pages to make them convert better, using primarily graphics on the page to have a strong call to action, pleasing layout, etc. Very little text. Were told different stories by three different reps, natch.
One of the reps did confirm that they're using a bot to do the front-line evaluations, then following up with human spot checks (shoot first, ask questions later, right?) Since the bot didn't see any text, it penalized the site. Yes, that's right - the site. So that means that instead of the quality score being associated with the keywords individually, the penalty was hitting all keywords that referenced that domain. That's why the damage hits so quickly.
Confirmed that they said this is to weed out MFAs and arbitragers. Got the same party line about "we're interested in your feedback" but basically it's not going to stop.
Here's my beef:
- True to form, Google tries to engineer their way out of a problem that really should require them to do a better job of keeping their house clean, both from a legal and an editorial perspective. Rather than changing their AdSense terms and tightening up their current processes for editorial review, they tried to "bot" their way into a better world.
- True to form, Google kills a fly with a sledgehammer, making all advertisers suffer for the sins of a particular sect. Remember the rumors about the global API tax being a rather overdone solution to punish a few SEMs who were abusing the API?
- Their bot isn't working, and good heavens why would it? How the heck can you automate a subjective thing like landing page quality? Stupidest idea I've ever heard of.
- It would be fairly easy to trick the bot, using dynamic landing pages that populate content using the referral string, etc. No doubt many MFA sites already make content pages this way just because it's cheaper than building real content or making static pages.
- Finally, my landing pages are none of Google's g*ddammed business. If I want to buy ads and point them to pictures of my aunt's flying monkey butt, that's my business, not theirs. There is not a single advertising venue on the planet that tries to evaulate an advertisers' post-action experience, and certainly none that then use the experience to determine the advertisers' next insertion order pricing. What hubris! Whoever told them they had that kind of power, and that they have that right? There is simply no precedent in any other media company in history that I'm aware of. Can you imagine if print publications tried this crap? "Uh, Mr. Jones, we looked at the website that you referenced in your ad and we didn't really like it. My ad manager hates green, and you use a lot of green. So, we're going to raise your rates by about 10x next month."
Here's a fun idea for a solution: use old-style cloaking software to redirect your PPC landing pages. Hide your "real" pages that actually convert and look pretty and are under your control, but point the spiders to Amazon or eBay pages.
ha ha ha...
<borrows tinfoil hat, puts it on>
ps. Footnote for the conspiracy theorists on this board. Notice that Google is trying out a CPA model? And that they're killing off advertisers who are reselling leads? Coincidence? Hm....
Thanks in advance for any input.
80% of my campaigns all were made inactive with a required $1-$10 bid increase to re-instate them. Every campaign had high quality landing pages with very keyword targeted content.
There is not a single advertising venue on the planet that tries to evaulate an advertisers' post-action experience
Not entirely true, otherwise those of us with Adsense on our sites wouldn't spend so much time chasing MFAs and other garbage ads OFF our sites.
It would be fairly easy to trick the bot, using dynamic landing pages that populate content using the referral string, etc. No doubt many MFA sites already make content pages this way just because it's cheaper than building real content or making static pages.
Uh. No. You are assuming that the algo works strictly on the basis of on page characteristics of the landing page, because, of course, that's all the information we've been given.
You, and I think most people are missing the point that there are many OTHER things in addition to onpage factors that are likely coming into play to cause the increases. Google hasn't said they are NOT using other variables, and they aren't probably lying about onpage factors. They just are being incomplete.
So, no, I'm betting you can't necessary cloak. I'm also betting that some of the other factors involved include the identification of various bid and advertising patterns on the part of adwords advertisers who are being hit.
..and of course it's a collateral damage thing.
Been monitoring blatant MFA (contentless) sites on YPN, MSN and Google, BTW. For our benchmark terms, (fairly narrow topic), they have almost disappeared from google pages (from almost total domination), have taken over MSN ads, with YPN being somewhat in the middle (YPN/overture) has the highest straight-up bids for the topic so the MFA sites only appear at the tail of the ad sequence.
And the tin-foil hat looks good on you ....
