Anybody have an extra $10?

[Discovery]

It looks like Google has just determined that $10 CPC's are the new baseline for advertising on Adwords.

Is this a Glitch AWR? Cause I think just about every Adwords advertiser is gong back re-evaluating Yahoo and MSN. Suddenly all their click fraud doesnt look so bad.

Discovery

[Mel66]

You beat me to it Discovery. ;)

We are getting totally hammered by this - over 300 of our keywords now have a $10 minimum bid. This is more than a 10-fold increase over what we were paying before. And these are our top keywords - both in clicks and conversions. It's killing us. There's no way we can pay $10 per click on a product with an average sale of $25.

We came through the last QS update relatively unscathed, so this really makes no sense to me.

I really hope this is just a glitch. I can't understand why keywords that were getting good CTRs and conversions a day or two ago have now been deemed Low Quality.

At least it's not just me. I was beginning to take it personally.

Who else is being asked to pony up the big bucks?

Melissa

[wasatch27]

So far I've seen no changes in our accounts.

[wes]

It is happening to one of our large accounts as we type...30 min ago it had 285 keywords "inactive for search" - now there are 313 (and counting)

[PPC]

Wow, this is not good news. How do I run a report to see all terms we have that are not displaying due to high minimum bids?

[wes]

Use your Tools in the Campaign Management tab, Advanced Search and Editing, Find and Edit Keywords, then uncheck the boxes for active and paused and run the search on all campaigns.

[Discovery]

scooped the scooper - sorry Mel.

It has affected our TOP keyword terms. Ones that have very nice CTR and great conversions. Basically these terms are what helped offset some of the other expensive terms or terms that had lower conversions. If we take these top producing terms out of the equation then you can kiss the financial feasibility of adwords goodbye.

Discovery

[PPC]

I am seeing this on (at least) one of my campaigns. Just talked to a rep at Google who told me that he would look into this and get back to me. Also, I could tell that this was the first he had heard of anything like this today.

[AdWordsRep]

Just returning my desk for a few moments between a bunch of scheduled meetings which continue into the afternoon - and have not yet had time to fully absorb this thread.

Just wanted to jump in, though, and say that what is occurring for some of you is not related to next week's announced Quality Score updates - and is being looked into as a priority.

AWR

[AdWordsRep]

A quick update to my post above.

Here's the message I received when I pinged the tech folks, which basically confirms that what some of you are seeing is a tech issue that will be addressed as quickly as possible.

Thanks for all of the reports. This is a technical issue - we've now identified the problem and expect to have this resolved soon. Please note that this is unrelated to the Quality Score update that we plan to release next week. So, I hope you'll accept my apology for the upset this has caused - but please don't mistake this for the Quality Score update to come.

AWR

[Mel66]

How do I run a report to see all terms we have that are not displaying due to high minimum bids?
FYI, you can also run a Keyword Report from the Reports tab. Click on "Filter Your Results" and use the drop down menus to select keyword status "inactive for search." That will give you a report that you can view in the interface, or export to Excel. Using this great feature I was able to quickly discover that we had 300+ KWs with $10 minimums...

I am glad this is a technical glitch, but boy are we getting killed today. The sooner this is fixed, the better. I'm just glad our CEO hasn't noticed - yet...

Melissa

[Discovery]

This is a crusher.

All our top terms have been disabled. This just goes to show you have to be diversified. You cant just play on Google. We're leaning hard on other sources, but we didnt figure out what was going on until too late in the morning to save the day. Our clients are PO'd and we have a loss for the day.

This has got to be pretty wide spread as I have fielded over 12 phone calls this morning from past and current clients asking if I knew what was going on. They are all in different industries, different locations and have a variety of spend levels.

I can only be thankful that the CPC increase was a silly amount otherwise I may have upped many bids and deleted a ton of keywords. I wonder just how many people did raise bids and delete keywords...

That will have an impact on everyones ranking over the next few days some for better some for worse.

I sure hope this is corrected today or it may be a long weekend.

Discovery

[limoshawn]

We started deleting the inactive keywords early, spent most of the evening re-submitting, most are back up but what a long day.
The worst of it is that there is no suitable alternative to Google.

[Discovery]

We are hanging in Limbo here AWR.

over 3000 top performing keyword terms moved up to $10. min bids. No word about what why or how. It's been over 24 hours…a lifetime of internet sales.

How many of your customers are losing big time? Content partners must be going wild with all the people who raised bids in a desperate attempt to gain traffic on their top keywords.

Lets put this into perspective. How would Google's board like to lose all profits for a day and have no indication if tomorrow will be any better?

This is a disaster

Discovery

[Discovery]

Google adwords blog Feb 14th 2007:
Now, Avichal from the Ads Quality team, has an update on upcoming changes to the system.....
"snipped junk on how to improve quality score"
As a result of this update, you may notice that the minimum bids increase for some of your keywords and decrease for others. To better understand the impact of this change, we suggest that you implement the Quality Score column. This will allow you to better monitor whether your minimum bids increase or decrease based on our changes. If you find that the minimum bids for any of your keywords increase, making your keyword inactive for search, please consider optimizing your campaign instead of raising your maximum CPC to the minimum bid. We recommend changes such as choosing a keyword that is more specific to the product or service that you offer or editing your ad text to make it more relevant to the keyword before you simply raise your minimum bid. By improving your quality we hope to provide the highest quality ads to our users while also providing you with the highest quality leads to maintain great ROI.

Now they do say that the Q score update is next week and that this $10 bid issue has nothing to do with the update. However, there is not one post about this "technical glitch" on the adwords blog. No explaination nothing. Why have they put this one under wraps? I thought that the blog was the place to go to find critical info about whats happening on Adwords?

SEL has some comments and links to the issue (http://searchengineland.com/070216-122543.php)

Will google be refunding the spike in ad spend for many advertisers?

[shilly]

A comment on TheSEMzone (http://www.thesemzone.com/2007/02/googles-new-quality-score-going-crazy.html) also suggests it is temporary, but I am not 100% sure. In addition to the solutions already posted, I noticed ANY deviations from the keyword to the adtext effects the min cpc dramatically. Keywords with apostrophe's, plurals, misspellings, etc... you are going to have to pay more for if they are not exactly written like that in your ad.

[Mel66]

Well, now I'm really sorry I checked the forum on a Sunday - my day is ruined! I figured (hoped?) the glitch would have been fixed sometime Friday and I'd read good news here. Now it appears that we've lost at least 2 days of sales.

I'm not gonna log into my Adwords account and ruin my day further. Google, this is a huge problem and the lack of info is not a good thing either.

(I was going to call it something other than "problem" but decided professional decorum was best.)

Melissa

[Discovery]

I turned off two major campaigns at Google on Friday afternoon and loaded up on other networks in protest. Guess what? I still received a ton of clicks and was charged both Saturday and Today. Not one campaign has been on for over 48 hours and I have people from Google in my sites right now, Sunday night.

Although I'm fuming, I'm actually interested in how we can pull off a good end of the month without using Google. Perhaps this is a good fire drill. I may not turn on the campaigns regardless of when they fix "the technical issue".

Discovery

[sem4u]

I have checked a couple of accounts this morning and things seem to be back to normal, but who knows what will happen the rest of this week? :confused:

[BuckfastMonk]

ouch! Hope you guys dont have too many headaches after all that! Where could one find info on googles quality score, which as I uderstand, is relased next week?

[jaked]

Just a question: Are you guys running affiliate sites? I am running a number of branded sites and we haven't seen any adverse effects. I am taking over an affiliate account sometime soon, so would be interesting to know if these changes are targetting specific types of site

Jake

[haplo]

hi jake,
i'm running a few campaigns for non-affiliate sites and it certainly affected some of them more than the others, but all were affected. The glitch wasn't limited to affiliate sites. All of my minimum bids now are back to normal though -- so it seems fixed.

[Discovery]

Late yesterday afternoon our campaigns were all returned to normal as far as we can tell.

No explanation from Google
No call during or after from our account rep
No word about their strategy to help monetarily or otherwise the thousands who mistakenly followed their advice and upped the bids and or deleted many keywords. (We did not, but many others did).

This event has really shown to me a very large weak spot that has developed within Google's Adwords group. A major catastrophe for many Adwords customers hits and they do nothing to communicate with them. Even now, Feb 20, there are no posts to their adwords blogs about the incident.

Either they have a poor mechanism for this type of communication, which I doubt, or they simply did not want to let word reach analysts' ears. I believe they opted for keeping this under wraps at the advertisers expense.

I only hope this is an anomaly and not a signal of how Google will handle advertisers now that we have made them a monolith.

Discovery

[Mel66]

Once again you beat me to the punch, Discovery. I was about to post the exact same thing.

The good news is, it looks like our order volumes on Google weren't affected too terribly. I heard somewhere (here, or at WMW, can't remember) that G was showing ads for keywords that said "Inactive" in the Adwords interface, so maybe that's what happened to us. (Although, I spot checked several on Friday, and our ads weren't on Google.com, so who knows.) And today everything's back to normal - in fact, we have fewer inactive KWs than we had before this whole fiasco started.

However, there has been no communication from G other than to acknowledge that it was a tech problem and not related to the impending QS update. Nothing on the forums is one thing - investors et al can easily read them. However, I even contacted my rep, and she didn't have any better info than what was posted publicly. And I rarely have problems with her or with any of the other G reps I've had. That's what really bothers me. Communication on this issue was basically non-existant, and I spent my entire Friday, and even part of the weekend, trying to figure out what was going on. That does not make me happy to say the least.

Melissa

[Discovery]

Mel,

I'm on the left coast so you should be beating me to the punch. But you were probably too busy promoting your blog :)

Discovery

[Mel66]

Mel,

I'm on the left coast so you should be beating me to the punch. But you were probably too busy promoting your blog :)

Discovery
Ha! I haven't even had time to update my blog with this latest and greatest story.

I don't know how some people do it - keep up with blogging and campaign management, all in a day's work.... lots of people do a really good job of both... they must not sleep, I guess!

Just keep an eye on Google serps for "the biggest Adwords fiasco yet" - this story is right up there with "garbitrage" :D

Melissa

[handyspoon]

I've read in various places about this Google Glitch.. It's funny though that there was nothing about it here on Clickz or Search Engine Watch...

[awolski]

What bothers me most about this is an AdwordsRep was here to post about the issue claiming they'd be back with more information but lo and behold they've disappeared.

Figures.

A

[AdWordsRep]

What bothers me most about this is an AdwordsRep was here to post about the issue claiming they'd be back with more information but lo and behold they've disappeared.

Figures. Ouch! (And point well taken - my apology)

Please see yesterday's Inside AdWords blog post for details: http://adwords.blogspot.com/2007/02/unexpected-minimum-bid-increases.html

AWR

[AussieWebmaster]

Here is a great example:

For the keyword [Consumer Price Index], we have a 10-15% CTR, with a landing page that is difficult to get more relevant to CPI. But the quality score is poor, and the min CPC is 0.30 CPC. Also there is no competition for this keyword.

For the keyword 'ichimoku'. For that keyword and others in the group, in organics we rank between number 6 to 1, yet our quality score is Poor, wtih a min CPC of $1.00.

[Mel66]

:bump:

Aussie, I wasn't seeing this phenomenon initially, but it looks like we got hammered yesterday. 370 keywords went inactive, most of them with $5 and a few with $10 minimum bids. I'll admit that some of the keywords are long shots on my part and maybe not the best, but a decent number of them have good CTRs, are very targeted (KW and landing page) and, worst yet for me, are getting good conversion rates. In fact conversion on the entire list of 370 is above our average percentage for Adwords.

Is this another glitch? I can only hope so, because otherwise it looks like a big money grab for Google.

Anybody else seeing this?

Melissa

[AussieWebmaster]

:bump:

Aussie, I wasn't seeing this phenomenon initially, but it looks like we got hammered yesterday. 370 keywords went inactive, most of them with $5 and a few with $10 minimum bids. I'll admit that some of the keywords are long shots on my part and maybe not the best, but a decent number of them have good CTRs, are very targeted (KW and landing page) and, worst yet for me, are getting good conversion rates. In fact conversion on the entire list of 370 is above our average percentage for Adwords.

Is this another glitch? I can only hope so, because otherwise it looks like a big money grab for Google.

Anybody else seeing this?

Melissa

I am all over this we the Google people... let's hope it is a glitch but the first comments out of the gate were not promising.

They said:

Their landing pages are fine and are not having any impact on the min bids.

Besides landing page quality (which is not playing a role in this case), min
bids are based entirely on performance. The better a keyword's performance, the lower its min bid. We've assigned the min bids for these keywords based on your client's performance on them. Their performance is okay, but currently not good enough to warrant min bids as low as what they are bidding, so the keywords are inactive.

If they meet the min bids, and their performance improves, the min bids
would drop accordingly, but given their performance thus far, the min bids
are appropriate.

[Mel66]

Well. I'm curious how G is defining "performance." Performance compared to other advertisers on the same keyword? Could be apples & oranges, depending on who else is advertising and WHAT they're advertising. Compared to other keywords in your own account? Again, apples and oranges. Compared to some standard they've set? Yikes.

And is this all mainly CTR based, or are there other factors driving it? I know bid amount is one, but that's circular, since Google is setting the minimums. Past performance? These things ebb and flow over time. Ad position? Again, it's circular.

It's nice of Google to offer more transparency, but telling me my keywords are "poor" doesn't help me improve them if, as far as I can tell, the ad copy, landing pages, CTR, ad position, and conversion are all good....

Melissa

[WineGirl]

Is everyone sure that this problem has been fixed? I still have keywords in my account that G is asking $10 min bid for. And these are keywords for which there is no competition whatsoever as they are running for pretty obscure products that no one else out there is likely to stock. I have no intention of raising these particular keywords to reactivate. Just want to know whether a) this is in fact a glitch and b) whether Google has gone mad.

[AussieWebmaster]

Is everyone sure that this problem has been fixed? I still have keywords in my account that G is asking $10 min bid for. And these are keywords for which there is no competition whatsoever as they are running for pretty obscure products that no one else out there is likely to stock. I have no intention of raising these particular keywords to reactivate. Just want to know whether a) this is in fact a glitch and b) whether Google has gone mad.

yes they have gone mad... and b) they are getting really greedy

[shilly]

I am still seeing some min cpc's that are way to high. Keywords are in ads, landing pages content, and urls.

Anyway, my reply in one of the posts in this thread, post #16, seemed to help lower min cpc's a little.