Hi all,

So, I'm sure a lot of you have seen this before, but it's my first flaming...

I've been running a very successful AdWords campaign - best CTR around 5-10%, average around 2.85%. Because I spent ages coming up with all sorts of keywords for the products I sell (I run a comparison site for electronic products), I've been getting a decent number of clicks (around 500-750 clicks a day) with a max CPC of only 7p.

Everyone was happy, Google were getting paid, I scraped just enough ROI to make it all worthwhile, that was until this morning, when traffic just STOPPED.

On closer inspection, it appears that without even an e-mail, Google have gutted the campaign, disabling 488 keywords, and imposed a ransom of 55p-£2.50 per click to get them reactivated!!!

It's just pure madness! Why oh why do they have to meddle, why can't they just let the market decide! 55p-£2.50 is just insane. I could just about soak up a 3p hike, but even at 15p I'm out of business.

So, I've sent Google an e-mail, pleading them to not be evil, but I doubt they'll give in.

Has anyone else had similar experiences? Did you have any luck talking Google down?

Rob

How many competitors are there in the PPC space?

Go in to the account and check to see if there was a serious spike in impressions versus clicks.

You may have been impacted by Impression Fraud.

take a look here and you may also get an idea of what could be happening...http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/004109.html

sounds like your landing pages may be able to use some tuning?

I can take a look - which would be the best report to get that info?

Across the board, there isn't that much competition, yet. I deliberately came up with a load of permumations of keywords a searcher might enter (by mixing up product model codes and names, based on my insight into their usage). The lack of competition is of course the reason I could break into the market at only 7p per click.

If other people had decided to do the same thing, that would have naturally and gradually driven up click prices - fair enough, that's competition for you.

But that's not what we're seeing here. Google has simply stepped in and said "hang on a sec, I see what you're doing here, hmm... I'm sure we can make more money out of this guy, let's crank the min CPC up 28x and see what happens".

It's wrong, and if Google wasn't running a virtual monopoly on PPC, they couldn't get away with it.

Thanks Chris.

OK, so it looks like quality score is determined by some "artificially intelligent" script hitting my site.

How stupid! As far as I'm concerned, if the CTR of my ads is good (which it is) and the CTR from my site to merchant sites is good (which it is), and the conversion rate at the merchant sites is good (which it is), then I've got myself a quality site - I'm getting what I want, as are my visitors!

Besides, they're not saying, "your site sucks, fix it and you can have traffic", they're saying "your site sucks, you could fix it... buhhhht, why not just pay us more instead" - talk about corrupt.

Zic I have to disagree with you on this one. With the plethora of websites out there today that simply throw images and calls-to-action at you, I think it's good that Google is trying to enforce quality. The system for the most part weeds out cookie-cutter type sites and puts the omen on the advertiser to actually spend time creating a unique and somewhat interesting landing page.

In my opinion, not having a charismatic landing page deserves a "tax;" especially since in many cases the page may make a bad impression on the visitor and lead to very poor conversions, or simply lead to a click on another ad (please do not take this as an attack on your site as I have not even seen it).

Now I understand the argument that a bad page will simply cause a "Back Button" click and a visit to another sponsored site, which means more money for Google. Yet I also see that eventually someone may be less likely to click on the sponsored links due to repeated navigation to low quality sites.

The way it seems to work is that you are going to either have to spend the money on design in order to improve your user experience, or spend the money paying for the privilege to rank among the higher quality pages.

It was inevitable, as they have the technology, and it makes sense, because it only encourages a better user experience. It does suck for the advertiser that just gets a price hike with no reasoning or explanation other than "work on your landing page." It also is a clever way for Google to just up some bid rates on tail terms without catching too much slack.

Chris, in my view, if a site like mine fulfils it's purpose, i.e. the customer finds what they want (a cheap price) and clicks through, then it is of good "quality".

If the site were of low quality, customers wouldn't click through, I wouldn't get paid, and I wouldn't have any money for PPC, thus I'd get weeded out naturally.

If Google simply left the market to dictate the correct price, there would only be a margin for me if I add value. In this instance, sure, I may not be the only price comparison site out there, but I invest a lot of time in my keyword strategy, so as to ensure I get closely targetted prices in front of as many searchers as possible.

I know for a fact, that some of my keywods have no competition whatsoever. So, in taking me out of the game, Google is actually hurting the user experience, as when the user searches for such a keyword, they're going to get no results!

Besides, to reiterate, Google are not enforcing that I increase the quality of my site to stay in the "game". They're also giving me the option of bribing them an extra 50p-£2.80 per click to overlook the issue!

Do you not agree that's just plain corrupt?!

If they were so hell bent on enforcing quality, they wouldn't even give you the opportunity to buy yourself out of the problem. They'd just tell you point blank - "improve your site, or you'll get no more traffic".

Sonic - I realise the alternative to paying Google's ransom is to "increase the quality of my landing page", but frankly, what the heck do they know about my landing page?! How can some robot, or even a person over at Google possibly assess the quality of a landing page objectively, as in through the eyes of all the different types of searchers out there.

They don't have access to my conversion reporting, so how could they possibly know how effective the landing page is?

What, so they just look at it and decide "urm, yeah don't like it, it sucks", or "it doesn't contain enough 'relevant' keywords" - I prefer to keep my landing pages clean and functional, the consumer doesn't always need/want to wade through a load of keyword rich filler.

In my opinion, not having a charismatic landing page deserves a "tax;"....

Suppose my landing page offered a terrific user *service*, so was bare and sparse by design. You know, like google.com for example. What then? I can't us AdWords as an advertising channel?

As web services grow we're going to see lots more of these "service pages", and probably using AJAX to boot. Where will this huge group of advertisers go? The concept that a landing page must be packed with "valuable content" in order to be "useful" is not a scalable concept as we move forward to the next generation of the web. And to the next generation of advertisers ;-)

Zic- I agree with you, but it was only a matter of time before they started analyzing landing pages was my point. I agree they are hijacking bid prices, because they realize you are not going to stop advertising on AdWords as long as your CPA is acceptable. They are using end user experience to increase their revenue, just like they always do.

Bang on integramed, it's plain insulting they think we're naive enough to swallow this.

I've moved all the "offending" keywords to Overture. They may not have the gadgets or depth of traffic Google does, but in my experience they play a fairer game.

With a bit of luck, if enough people do the same, Google will have to wake up and smell the java - they are not invincible!

Sonic, I really think they're overstepped the line this time, and it may well cost them dearly in the long run.

It used to be relatively simple, and clever. They *know* how well you're ads are performing in isolation from your landing page, as they track the CTR. Thus, it made a lot of sense to reward better performing adverts on that basis, as they were obviously relevant and enticing to the searcher, and per search, they made Google the most money.

The responsibility was with us, where it should be, to ensure a quality experience on our end. If the experience wasn't there, the user would leave, and we'd have to up our game or die.

It could hurt them in the long run, but having end users wading through poor results to find what they want will also hurt them in the long run. One could have a pathetic site, but write compelling ad copy acheiving a great CTR. An argument to that is that the company will not be around very long if they do not convert the customers with their poor site.

I haven't had personal experience in bid price hiking, except the normal amounts, so I don't know how unfairly or widespread its happening with the landing page analysis. I do, however, think they are pissing off a lot of advertisers, who by the way account for something like 98% of their revenue.

Ultimately the system would self correct itself, by weeding out the advertisers with poor landing pages, but this is Googles way of speeding up the process.

I don't think we can stress that point enough, in the PPC game, if you don't have a quality site, you simply can't survive. Just as, if you run a shop and sell crummy products, sooner or later you can't afford the rent and atrophy. This is the natural order of things.

If they genuinely believe their own twaddle, Google are foolish to think that they can single-handedly decide if a site is of "good quality".

Only the market can decide this, by naturally integrating the attitudes and experiences of all consumers who actually use the site as it is intended.

The only way it can be sped up, is by simplifying it, thus reducing it's accuracy.

The result - quality advertisers get persecuted to further fill Google's pockets, all under the false pretense of upholding the "quality" of the user experience.

C

Besides, to reiterate, Google are not enforcing that I increase the quality of my site to stay in the "game". They're also giving me the option of bribing them an extra 50p-£2.80 per click to overlook the issue!

Do you not agree that's just plain corrupt?!



That's not corrupt. That's smart. Google know that they can plead and beg advertisers all they want "Oh pleeeeeeeeease make sure your keywords are relevant, pleeeeease have useful unique site content that users will like. But advertisers wouldn't listen to that and it would be like p*ssing against the wind.

Like anybody with a bit of sense, Google realised that if they want to promote change, and influence the calibre and quality of advertisers in their programme, they've have to hit where it hurt - in the wallet. That's why they introduced the whole Quality Based Bidding system nearly a year ago, and landing page quality is a part of that which they've been warning us about since last christmas, when they posted they site quality guidelines.

The hike in bids isn't a bribe for them to overlook the issue - its

1) their attempt to force bad advertisers out of the market, which is fair enough, because I think you're wrong in saying if left on its own the market can decide by itself. As it is, AdWords is full of little crap sites with no content apart from other AdWords ads and a paragraph packed with keywords. Despite your predictions, thousands of these sites continue to hang in there

2) saying "Ok, we think this keyword / site could be better, so if you improve it and meet our criteria, the bids will be lowered"

Sure, its hurting a lot of advertisers, and no doubt of course that there is some collateral with some good sites caught in the net by mistake, but overall I think it can only benefit the long term sustainability of PPC

If Google truly believed in their measure of "quality", they should give an offending advertiser ONE option - improve quality, or receive no further traffic.

This strategy would enforce their policy perfectly.

Why then, do they also give advertisers the option to pay more to continue receiving traffic, rather than improving quality?

On this basis, even a site that rates 0/10 on Google's quality scale can get traffic if they're willing to pay the price.

How is that not corrupt?

I understand each side of the story but the only thing is what happen to good site/landing pages that get caugh up in the middle of this thing?

I think we all understand it's necessary to create a better user experience but technology can't replace common sense. Some good quality site and landing pages are getting crashed by Adwords.

We got caugh in the middle. We contact Adwords staff and all they can say is generalities. It looks like they don't even look at our actual pages. We follow their guidelines religiously and we get wacked.

Trying to play God gets you on the evil side.

All we'd ask is some common sense, don't always trust an algorithm, put people in front of screen when an account bring you $15k a month. It's call respect.

I had the same thing happen to one of my client's accounts; min. bid went from $.03-$.05 to $5-$10/click -- slightly ridiculous, don't ya think? Our keywords and ad text are very relevant, as was the landing page we sent users to AND we were averaging a 8% CTR AND 10% CVR -- not the signs of "poor" user experience. If we were getting 8% CTR and .05% CVR, then maybe...but 10% CVR!!! Our landing page had relevant content, but was just one page, so I think that's why we were penalized.

It was announced in July 7 Blog: Landing page quality update
http://adwords.blogspot.com/

And I've got no problem with Google taking landing page into consideration, although when did they become the experts about quality experiences users are expecting -- for every vertical out there!!! They should have at LEAST alerted the advertisers that were going to be affected (because you know they knew who we were) and give them a chance to submit new landing pages before jacking up the CPCs to completely assinine rates...seriously.

So now, according to Google: "Our system will
automatically review your new landing page since the evaluation is part of
our algorithm. You can wait for your minimum bid to drop before you
activate your keywords. This will ensure you are not paying more than you
want. However, we cannot promise that changes made to websites will drop
your minimum bids. In addition, please know the algorithm does have a
delay in updating accounts.

...and while I wait for the bid to drop, I lose 100+ leads per day..

According to Adwords' customer service agents CR% isn't an indication of a quality landing page!

CR% can be low and still be a good quality landing page while high CR% may not necesseraly be an indication of a good landing page. We do between 10%to 26% in CR%.

We took your mom, you've 2 choices:

1- Pay the ransom or
2- Fix what you've done incorectly. Up to you to figure it out. Warning, even if you find out, we may not give you back your mom.

They're so funny!

"I've got no problem with Google taking landing page into consideration, although when did they become the experts about quality experiences users are expecting -- for every vertical out there!!!"

Exactly! No algorithm, person or company could possibly accurately aggregate the needs, opinions and experiences of every searcher out there. That's what the market is for - let it work it's "magic"!

By playing God where it's just not necessary, we're going to end up with a swathe of homegenous web pages, all jumping through hoops for Google. Doesn't sound like a "quality" user experience to me.

All this coming from a company which prides itself on thinking "outside the box", and coming up with new, innovative solutions to common problems, using the culmination of it's human insight, rather than clinging to dumb policies.

Above all though, the simple fact that they give you the option to pay them off to forget the whole thing transparently exposes the fact that, yeah they care a bit about quality, but they care more about making money.

How can CR not be propotionate to page quality?

Users invariably have a goal when they arrive at a page, be it "find the cheapest price for product X" or "find out if product Y is any good".

The only application of the word "quality" in this context, is as a measure of how effectively that web page helps the user achieve their goal.

This measure of quality is exposed as the CR - if the page "works" for them, they convert, if it doesn't, they leave.

The exception to this rule are scam sites which trick you into clicking and converting. Everyone knows these are "evil". Google should devote significant resources to hunting them down and cutting them off at the source, period.

The exception to this rule are scam sites which trick you into clicking and converting. Everyone knows these are "evil". Google should devote significant resources to hunting them down and cutting them off at the source, period.
Zic you have some passionate feeling about this subject, which I respect. One problem is that unless you are willing to give blanket access to your conversion rates to Google through some sort of analytics system they may have which could measure this (but that they would never use for that, especially in determining quality or kw pricing :rolleyes: ), they would be unable to determine if your image or duplicate content-only pages would be any good.

Back to a point I thought about from earlier…one thing I want to propose is that CTR is proportionate to a number of factors involving the ad, but nearly none involving the landing page. There is no way for a searcher to "guess" that the landing page is going to be quality content (even by their subjective definition of that). An exception: one of the factors in the ad helping higher CTR is sometimes the Domain Name in the URL, since if someone was searching for Coca Cola and saw CocaCola.com in the ad, they might assume the quality of the page would be good. So we can forget about CTR being applied to the quality score part of the algo, everyone agree?

Chris - For some reason I got your original post through via e-mail before you posted it! Here's my response, which doesn't respond to the CR monitoring idea:

You're right Chris, there's no way a searcher can guess as to the subjective "quality" of a page to them, no more than Google can guess this on their behalf - it really does come down to the individual.

Granted, a decision has to be made as to whether the page is of sufficient quality to the "average" visitor, but neither Google, nor any other individual, is qualified to make this call.

The only effective method of measuring quality, is to put the site out there, and see how it performs - i.e. in a commercial context, how well it converts, how much ROI (if any) it yields, and what the margin is after paying the market rate for the PPC traffic.

If the quality is bad, be it at the ad, landing page level or both, the advertiser will lose money, and be forced to pull the campaign, and regroup to improve quality.

The draconian measures Google are taking to "accelerate" this process (with dubious motives IMO, given you can just buy them off), stifle the innovation which is the healthy by-product of a pure market system.

If Google has their way, sooner or later we'll all be running identikit sites, adhering to Google's idea of what consitutes a valuable site - what a boring and stagnant place the web will be.

Personally, if there was a way to have Google base their "quality" assumptions on my CR (which they clearly have the technology to do), I'd go for it hands down over the current farce.

But they simply won't do it. They'd find that a lot, perhaps the majority of sites getting penalised for "low quality", actually convert very well, using no unethical tactics.

The smartest (and they're assuming, the most price elastic) advertisers would thus get the most traffic, for the best price, and rightly so. This would ensure survival of the fittest, as does the quality (CTR) focus on the advert side.

Instead, what they're actually doing (in my case, and I'm sure many others), is capitalising on forward thinking (and they presume, price elastic) advertisers, forcing them to fork over more cash under the false pretext of upholding "quality".

heres an option for all those thousands of permutated model numbers- remove ones that get no searches. we had something like this go on so we dropped all the super odd ball ones and kept with the more frequent combos.

Psurplus, thanks for the suggestion.

In my case, they've also disabled keywords that are effective on a CTR basis, i.e 3-6% average, with some topping 8-10%.

Did you have the same, or did Google just disable the low CTR keywords?

because other keywords in my ad groups got very good ctr, the other uncommon combos for model numbers stayed active.

but because the size of the ad groups was getting large and i knew they weren't getting searches i removed them.


the kw's you have that get good ctr must not have good landing pages, or so google thinks. perhaps you need to update some of the landing pages. i frequently am updating landing pages as we move products around and develop more categories on our site.

if you don't mind pm me and i'll check out some of your ads.

Hi Zic, and everyone else,

This is my first ever post to a forum, as I normally can't be bothered to contribute to these posts, but I'm so mightily pi**ed off about this recent Google algo update that I just had to add my story of woe to the conversation...

I only started affiliate marketing about 6-7 months ago, and yet things have been going so well that just last month I decided to give up my full time job in the aerospace industry and pursue this affiliate marketing thing full-time. I was doing pretty well with a highly targeted set of PPC campaigns (CTR's of up to 25% in some cases) in a number of different areas and converting visitors into sales well enough to make a profit of about 100%, which I was very pleased with.

However, about 3 days ago I started to notice my sales dropping through the floor, and when I checked to see if my ads were running, I saw they weren't, as my minimum bids for about 95% of my ads had gone up to €4 - €8 per click!!! (Previously my max bids were around €0.40 - €0.50) This happened simultaneously across all my websites and across all my Adwords campaigns with no warning! So basically overnight Google gutted all my campaigns and have put me out of business.

I've been e-mailing Google about this, but just seem to get canned responses where they copy and paste bits of their website into their reply. The only useful bit of info I got was that it was due to a poor quality score on my landing pages - but of course no explanation as to what it was about my landing pages that caused this sudden poor quality score. I was directed to their general, vague and unhelpful guidelines on landing page quality, which are about as much use as a chocolate condom! I know that my landing pages (I own several review sites) provide relevant, unique, value-added content to users. They are specific to the keywords for which my ads appear, and are also specific to the ad text - in fact, they couldn't possibly be more relevant to the search query for which my ads appear, and yet Google have decided from afar that they suck (apparently) and held me to ransom to re-activate my ads. There is no way that I can afford €4 - €8 for a click without making ridiculous losses!

The thing that REALLY (really really really) annoys me is that I can see many of my competitors' ads still running. But when I look at their landing pages, they are very similar in layout and general content to mine (though not identical). There is no way that Google could penalise my site without penalising these competitors' sites too. But they do not. Other competitors with ads that continue to run have landing pages with no useful content whatsoever - just a few links and a couple of lines of unhelpful text. Yet my highly-targetted landing pages with several paragraphs of in-depth reviews, user reviews and screenshots of the products have been dropped! How unfair is that?! Call that a valuable user experience??!!?!?! These competitors of mine must think it's Christmas! There is no doubt that I have been treated unfairly here, as I have been treated differently to my competitors, yet all the Google reps seem to be able to do is cut and paste bits of their websites into various e-mails to me. I might as well go and talk to my cat!

I totally agree with Zic that the market should be allowed to naturally determine what consitutes a quality site. In fact, I agree with every single point Zic has made here! I do understand what Google are TRYING to do here in weeding out MFA pages and traffic arbitrage pages, but all I can say is that they've failed completely and (hopefully) shot themselves in the foot in the process! I've read LOTS of posts in various forums on this topic today and it seems there is a big stink about the fact that they've removed so many useful, unique, relevant, QUALITY pages from their sponsored listings.

So here's a question for you all...

Does anyone think they will fix their algorithm (because there is no doubt that it needs fixing) and re-activate our ads???? And if so, when?

Thanks for reading - apologies if the long post put some of you to sleep!

Neil.

Amen brother - let it all out!

You're in exactly the same situation as me, as I'm sure are many others.

The only hope is that on the whole, this cash fishing exercise will meet with a brick wall of resistance - I for one couldn't afford the extra 55p-£2.50 per click even if I wanted to!

The very market they're trying to bend to their will will then give them a much needed bite in the a$$.

Sites like ours' are AdWord's bread and butter, and AdWords is Google's bottom line. If enough of us call their bluff, they'll have no choice but to play fair.

To address your question, who knows what they'll do (if anything), but two amicable solutions spring to mind:

1. Turn the algorithm off and focus on the search part of the user experience. Let us worry about building quality pages - it's what we do! If we're no good at it, we'll die out anyway.

2. Base the algorithm on some objective measure of landing page effectiveness, e.g. CR, or exit CTR - depending on the revenue model. As we know, they have the technology to track these metrics, and integrate them with the Google stats.

Intrinsically, these measures aggregate the experiences of the real people who actually try to use the site for it's intended purpose, rather than some brain-washed Google drone or algorithm making a one-dimensional decision that a site sucks.

If enough people find what they want, and click through or buy (high quality), the page will score a high CR/CTR. If the majority of people hit "back" and leave (low quality), the page will score a low CR/CTR. It's just that simple.

The more keywords the better I've found. After the first time I saw the best keywords go up in price, I decided to find the "cheap" keywords that no one was using but still got some clicks per day. I got a program called keyword expander and after a few days, finally hit Google's maximum of 50,000 keywords. you're limited to 2,000 per ad group but 50,000 total per account. The key is to find those combinations of keywords that most of your competitors haven't thought of. I've found quite a few and I've lowered my CPC. Just take the basic single words and surround them with other relevant words. It doesn't cost anymore to have more keywords and you're crazy if you don't figure out all the possible combinations of keywords that relate to what you're selling.

Good thinking Bobble2 - that was precisely my strategy.

I figured, if I'm the only guy (or one of only a few) who took the time and thought to think up a particular keyword, I've effectively carved out myself a "mini niche".

For a while the market justly rewarded my initiative with a low CPC. I was operating in an uncrowded area of the keyword space (low competition) and was providing value in the form of highly targetted, good converting pages, to users for whom the choice (search results) would otherwise have been limited or non-existant.

In my opinion I was actually improving the "user experience".

But then, last week, out of the blue (as you'll gather if you read my initial post) Google senselessly gutted the campaign, and demanded I increase quality (nothing to do there, the pages work well as they are) or pay them more.

If these keywords were genuinely worth the increased price, they would have reached that point naturally as a product of supply and demand. What we're seeing here is price gouging, plain and simple.

I'm afraid to say - it could happen to you (and probably will).

Thanks Chris.

OK, so it looks like quality score is determined by some "artificially intelligent" script hitting my site.

How stupid! As far as I'm concerned, if the CTR of my ads is good (which it is) and the CTR from my site to merchant sites is good (which it is), and the conversion rate at the merchant sites is good (which it is), then I've got myself a quality site - I'm getting what I want, as are my visitors!

Besides, they're not saying, "your site sucks, fix it and you can have traffic", they're saying "your site sucks, you could fix it... buhhhht, why not just pay us more instead" - talk about corrupt.

May I ask, how does your site make money? Is it a comparison site where users write reviews, or you write content?

Or is it just a machine-generated site with mostly links to ads?

This matters, not only because Google has an opinion about such sites, but because users dislike being sent to some kinds of sites based on misleading ads, dynamic keyword insertion that mimics their query, etc.

Google actually profits from AdSense sites, so I'd say it's fair to say they are looking to remove certain types of ads from their system based on user outrage about those ads. Google might lose AdSense revenue, so I would have to guess that the change is revenue neutral and the intent of the policy is to help some advertisers and to serve all users, while affecting other advertisers to achieve the end result. Sounds brutal but IMHO the intent is not about pure profit, nor solely about their opinion of what a good site is.

As on the organic side, users ultimately hold search engines accountable if they display results that the user does not deem useful.

It was inevitable, as they have the technology, and it makes sense, because it only encourages a better user experience. It does suck for the advertiser that just gets a price hike with no reasoning or explanation other than "work on your landing page." It also is a clever way for Google to just up some bid rates on tail terms without catching too much slack.

BTW, on this front, I think that the "work on your landing page" concept is a red herring. Some of these sites can work on them all day long and will still not pass. If the whole business model and methodology is about sending users to deceptive pages, short of beginning to rewrite a whole site and base it around quality content and/or a direct retail model, where before it was just about screen scraping, machine-generated content, and links... well that's a far cry from just "working on your landing page," it's changing your spots completely.

So when they tell you to "work on your landing page," my take is they don't really mean it.

If you're borderline, and not a serious scam artist of the type they seem to want to target, it's time to contact someone and have them take a second look. I am definitely seeing some legit sites have min bids go up.

Hi Andrew, Zic, and everyone else...

My landing pages have no ads on them whatsoever. Just reviews and user reviews of the product I'm promoting and links to that product. Each page is dedicated to a particular product and was written by me (not by any artificial means). There is no dynamic keyword insertion, no tricks, just highly-relevant landing pages with lots of unique content that aims to add value to the products I'm promoting. My landing pages provide a great deal of relevant info to the user who is searching for my recommended products. Yet my bid prices have just gone through the roof and my ads have been disabled!!

Seems to me like this recent balls-up by Google (since I don't really know how else it could be described) is in the public interest. I might write an article on this and mail it off to various newspapers and maybe even to the BBC when I've finished moving house!

Has anyone managed to get their Google rep to admit there's been a mistake made about how their landing page(s) have been reviewed yet? Has anyone managed to get their ads re-listed without paying Google's extortionate ransom for doing so?

Every time I think about the (seemingly random) unfairness of all this it makes my blood boil! Here I am watching my competitors with similar or often inferior landing pages with little relevant content still running their ads on Google where mine used to be!

Seems like there's no more fair trade on Google.

Neil.

Hi Andrew. I'm familiar with your work! Glad you stopped by to throw in your two cents - we must be turning a head or two!

In answer to your question, I'll be completely honest. My site is machine generated, in the sense that for each product I promote a dynamic page is generated, containing the name of the product, a picture, our rating and the users' rating (if any have been submitted) along with, of course, a list of the cheapest prices we're aware of, with merchant links to each.

The price comparison engine is operated by a third party, who pay per exit click from my site. I assure you, however, that I make no attempt to trick users into clicking. I value the relationship with the third-party (they'd simply cut me off if my traffic was consistently low quality) and I want the user to come back.

Now, I realise that, in itself, the site is hardly breakthrough, but I'd argue strongly against anyone who suggested it to be unethical, or conducive to a "poor user experience". Indeed, it's just a simple, but effective price comparison site.

The USP as it were, which I feel Google are exploiting at the expense of the user experience, is in the breadth and focus I've been achieving with the AdWords campaign.

I've purposely discovered highly relevant keywords that competitors haven't thought of, but which users are searching for. Yes, this meant I got clicks for cheaper and thus made a higher margin, but the healthy by-product of this was a highly relevant search result, coupled to a laser targeted landing page, where one did not exist before.

I win, the user wins and Google, well... Google's the "house" - they always win!

Couple of questions for you Andrew (I'm really keen to pick your brain on this topic!):

1. If Google frown on dynamic keyword insertion, why do they continue to offer it?

2. If you agree that the "work on your landing page" concept is a red herring, but disagree this is a profiteering exercise, why do you think they give you the option to buy your way out of the "quality" conundrum? Why don't they just switch off your traffic, period?

Alas, yet another client of mine (who had high CTR and CVR rates) has been penalized for landing page -- min. CPCs have gone up to $5-$10/click.

However I've noticed:

1) it's only for the high click volume (and lead/revenue driving) keywords

2) my content targeted campaign has not been affected

Anyone have content targeted campaigns that haven't been affected? Shouldn't the algorithm be applied to entire account, and not just search targeted?

The minimum CPCs only apply to search. I don't think content has a minimum CPC - although if you set your CPC too low, your ad might not show much in the content network.

Melissa

The minimum CPCs only apply to search. I don't think content has a minimum CPC - although if you set your CPC too low, your ad might not show much in the content network.

Melissa

There is no Max or Min set for content... the limits are set only for the search network and are based on Google Search numbers.

If the landing page of your ad it is not well optimiced or you manage a "scrapper site" they will raise the bid. There is other topic about this

demetzell, isn't the mark of an "optimised" ad a good CTR? If so, no problem there - my ad was running around 3% CTR average (across several hundred keywords) with some topping 8-10%.

Please can you explain the term "scrapper site"?

A good CTR on the ad does not mean that the landing page is well optimised.
With scrapper site i mean those porals that have as an unique content sponsored listings. If the adbot don´t find other content than <h ref> taged one. you get penaliced, so it raise your bids.

Scapper site - a site that scraps its content from other places.... search results, directory listings made up of title tag and descriptions,

basically sites that have scripts to create their content without their own input.

We got confirmation by our Adwords' rep (after we bugged him since last week). He explicitly said the first motive for this new algorythm is please their CFO - meaning getting higher CPC. Lets not be naive, Google has to please analysts and their shareholders now.

In other words the main motive is getting more money by having companies pay the ransom, and if they can clean the bottom of their advertisers so be it.

So you've a few choice:

- Pay the ransom.
- Improve your sites and landing pages (and pray hard)
- Get out of the game (can't use the term market anymore as the auction is tricked).
- Use MSN and Yahoo more (good way to fight Google monopoly).

Google just became like any other company. Amen.

I have had the same thing happen to some of my accounts...

forget about setting up new groups and think you can get a low bid... I had one that was inactivated with 100% CTR - granted only 5-5 clicks... but it was in position 6 and it went from 10 cents to $5 a click to reactivate????

That moto is going to be their killer - how is that doing no evil?

This $10 minimum bid has happened to me too.

I let the campaigns sit their with no clicks for weeks. Strangely however, there are some days that they do get impressions and clicks.

The minimum bids go from $$$ back to 0.25, then back up to $$ all on their own. I'll attribute this to my competition going in and out, bidding up and down, whatever.

So I have on question.

Has anyone seen their bids go down (and stay down) after "optimizing" their landing page and/or website?

This $10 minimum bid has happened to me too.

I let the campaigns sit their with no clicks for weeks. Strangely however, there are some days that they do get impressions and clicks.

The minimum bids go from $$$ back to 0.25, then back up to $$ all on their own. I'll attribute this to my competition going in and out, bidding up and down, whatever.

So I have on question.

Has anyone seen their bids go down (and stay down) after "optimizing" their landing page and/or website?

I have lowered the bids with working on the landing pages - making them very specific to the term helps - don't go generic and expect it to be seen as applicable... the more specific the better.

I have lowered the bids with working on the landing pages - making them very specific to the term helps - don't go generic and expect it to be seen as applicable... the more specific the better.

That's good to hear. I didn't know if I should abandon those campaigns completely, or if I should work on the landing page.

This really is starting to feel like the seo nightmare. Webmasters who dread whenever google updates it's rankings. Now advertisers are going through the same thing.

The worst of this is adding new words.... paying $5 even for the first 10 clicks adds up over a few hundred words and making that back for words you normally pay say 15 cents takes a long time!