Introduction Of Quality-Based Minimum Bids For AdWords

[Chris_D]

Just heard that Google will introduce some changes to provide more control to run on keywords that the client decides are important.

There will be either active or inactive keywords — instead of normal, in trial, on hold, and disabled.

Danny - have you seen a press release?

[Chris_D]

https://adwords.google.com/select/qbb.html

[nuthin]

don't really like the introduction of the minimum bids myself.
say i was paying 10cents on a fairly local keyword phrase which gets a fair amount of traffic, hope that now it wont rise to a "minimum" of say 20cents.
will be interested to see what happens anyway.
at the end of the day it's simply going to mean more money for GOOG.

[seobook]

I think they were looking for a way to block the profitablilty of

buy dead animal at eBay

type ads. the old method threw out too much baby with the bathwater (disabling good terms). the new method makes some of those eBay ads prohibitively expensive and could block some of the eBay off topic type ads.

of course this could allow you to get many broad words that were slightly not relevant enough before by paying a bit more for the clicks.

this change will probably effect ad relevancy for the better and for the worse depending on how they setup the criteria.

if people can automate many of the 1 cent ads they can probably make a killing reselling traffic through overture or another PPC.

[nuthin]

they could just simply cut down and disallow ads that redirect to affiliate web sites straight away, if they ain't already doing this.

i know the ebay ads you talk about, they use a redirect to particular sections with the affiliates ID, suprised Google still allows these?

well not really that suprised.

[seobook]

Originally Posted by nuthin

i know the ebay ads you talk about, they use a redirect to particular sections with the affiliates ID, suprised Google still allows these?

some affiliates make business models and google ad sales more efficient. I do not think they want to filter out all affiliates, just duplication and low quality ads.

[nuthin]

i can't see how Google would want Adwords affiliate advertisers that have sites that redirect straight away to the merchant sites.

thought Google wanted quality?

oh wait i can see now, it's all about the dollars.

i always thought they would already do this, guess not..

so i could theoritically load up an adwords campaign on a higher end product with low adwords advertisers and simply do a few targeted ads targeting those keywords and then redirect them straight away to the merchant site, just attatched with my aff ID?

probably going a bit off topic for this dicussion thread though.

[seobook]

Originally Posted by nuthin

so i could theoritically load up an adwords campaign on a higher end product with low adwords advertisers and simply do a few targeted ads targeting those keywords and then redirect them straight away to the merchant site, just attatched with my aff ID?

I think you are forgetting that markets are competitive and that people chase each other around. eventually it is a zero sum game, and the more people playing in the game means more people find unexplored or underpriced markets and bid them up. it does not lessen the relevancy of their results to have a useful affiliate ad.

there are some original sites that advertise that are far more hunks of crap than what affiliates promote. remember that many affiliates will want to make a good sum of money and be driven to the best converting products. if products have a bad brand and a bunch of negative press it is far more likely that it will not convert well when people click on the page.

you gotta step back and look at it from beyond the this ad or that ad level IMHO.

[JNap]

Originally Posted by Chris_D

Just heard that Google will introduce some changes to provide more control to run on keywords that the client decides are important.

There will be either active or inactive keywords — instead of normal, in trial, on hold, and disabled.

Back to the beggining of the thread...I hope the change stops the Google "switch my keyword impression counts without giving me a hint as to WHY..." However, months ago I wrote an ad to sell a motorcycle muffler bolt on part (follow along) did my research, used the keywords in the ad title and copy etc...exact match. Google Adwords kept 99% of the keywords on hold. A week later I called support and asked..."does your 'predictive quality score' (not called that at the time) know how to sell a yamaguchi bolt on muffler? (I forget the exact spelling but you get my point). In other words, "history" is always used, so if I enter a market with lousy ads being served, I must basically COPY the other ads to get served or pay a premium to get my ads served. Two weeks later the keyword impression count jumped (free shipping sale was over) I scored high 5% plus on many keywords, and many were still shifted in and out of hold despite my pleadings.

So I hope this works, at least the ads will get served by what they say.

[AussieWebmaster]

It is also being done to help advertisers who have had problems with constant disabled terms. We have a couple that I have tried a number of methods before reverting to an extended list of "phrase" matched longer keywords with a serious number of negative terms.

[Heidi9771]

Does anyone know when the change will take effect?

[AussieWebmaster]

Originally Posted by Heidi9771

Does anyone know when the change will take effect?

I was told by SES or beginning of August.

[andrewgoodman]

Originally Posted by JNap

Back to the beggining of the thread...I hope the change stops the Google "switch my keyword impression counts without giving me a hint as to WHY..." However, months ago I wrote an ad to sell a motorcycle muffler bolt on part (follow along) did my research, used the keywords in the ad title and copy etc...exact match. Google Adwords kept 99% of the keywords on hold. A week later I called support and asked..."does your 'predictive quality score' (not called that at the time) know how to sell a yamaguchi bolt on muffler? (I forget the exact spelling but you get my point). In other words, "history" is always used, so if I enter a market with lousy ads being served, I must basically COPY the other ads to get served or pay a premium to get my ads served. Two weeks later the keyword impression count jumped (free shipping sale was over) I scored high 5% plus on many keywords, and many were still shifted in and out of hold despite my pleadings.

So I hope this works, at least the ads will get served by what they say.

Oddly enough, the new system might also work on somewhat of a "predictive" model, at least as far as assigning Quality Scores to keywords. The difference is, you won't be On Hold or In Trial or Disabled, but you still might be asked to pay a higher minimum.

OTOH, I have confirmed that the new absolute minimum really has fallen to one cent. Not that it will affect many advertisers.

I don't believe this is a radical change. For my day-to-day approach to helping clients get more out of their campaigns, I think it will make the job easier because we won't wonder just how many times should we try to reawaken frequently-disabled keywords. Relevancy remains a primary criterion for ranking well in the ad list, but now, you can avoid some of the hassles of campaign management by using a little cash. Some companies have it to spend and will trade in some of their money if it buys them convenience and an easy way to buy extra targeted exposure.

On the whole it should increase the overall amount of monetized inventory for Google, also. Yes, this makes their revenues go up. So did their introduction of matching options -- it showed Overture that you could invent a system that allowed more flexibility to advertisers so that they weren't fighting over the same 10% of the inventory. Overture eventually caught up and introduced matching options.

I was a constant critic when the AdWords Select program launched specifically when it came to the "enforced minimums." It was a happy day when Google eliminated these. So I can see why people are wary of anything that smells like a price increase. But I will reserve judgment & see how it plays out in actual accounts. I for one have just about had it with the hassle of dealing with repeatedly-disabled keywords, so I think I welcome this change.

[AussieWebmaster]

Andrew I agree that the numerous disabling gets old fast and I hope this is a positive change and not another problem to deal with.

[shor]

Originally Posted by AussieWebmaster

Andrew I agree that the numerous disabling gets old fast and I hope this is a positive change and not another problem to deal with.

That is probably the main benefit we see coming out of this change. For any user with large inventories, restarting zombie keywords is not fun.

[AussieWebmaster]

Originally Posted by shor

That is probably the main benefit we see coming out of this change. For any user with large inventories, restarting zombie keywords is not fun.

zombies and the good ones that just seem to fall for no obvious reason.

[andrewgoodman]

Like maybe when you get a bout of impression spam or a pop culture event swamps you with irrelevant searches... yadda yadda... definitely there needed to be a more sophisticated way of dealing with that... you can't always be bugging the Google reps about potential impression spam, for example, but if you don't take some kind of action you're left with that nagging impression that you were needlessly disabled... etc. etc.

And now, back to the other water cooler.

[AussieWebmaster]

Originally Posted by andrewgoodman

Like maybe when you get a bout of impression spam or a pop culture event swamps you with irrelevant searches... yadda yadda... definitely there needed to be a more sophisticated way of dealing with that... you can't always be bugging the Google reps about potential impression spam, for example, but if you don't take some kind of action you're left with that nagging impression that you were needlessly disabled... etc. etc.

And now, back to the other water cooler.

There's another watercooler!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[BoardTracker]

I must say that the google adwords system is very disappointing. It seems that the google team is working very hard to make the system as bad as they can.
View examples from the last 5 minutes..

1. using a keyword system to generate list of related keywords.. got a list of 614 terms for PDA related searches. entered the list into google and got this message :

Online Pharmacy ID Required [?]
Your keyword list appears to contain pharmacy-related content while targeting the United States
...
Keyword(s): pharmacy pda software

First, I dont have this phrase in the list I submitted whatsoever. Why on earth would google tell me I cant list that when I'm not even trying to?
Second, so what if I target US people who look for pharmacy related products? What if I have a review site for pharmacy related pda software?

2. "xxasdf zaurus: Inactive [Increase quality or bid $5.00 to activate]"
quality of bid? Indeed I do not know what xxasdf is and its probably nothing, but I doubt google's adwords knows that. In fact there are over 2K results for that when you search google but the point is, $5? where does that come from? Why on earth would I want to pay $5 per click on such an obscure search term? Are you telling me that there are so many people bidding on that term that I need to outbid them at $5 to even get viewed? I doubt it. Especially since when searching for that term I get no ads at all. So why do I need to raise the bid to $5 CPC? Maybe google is "tired" or targeting less searched-for terms and want us to fight one another over the more popular terms (forcing us to outbid each other rather than look for more specific terms)?

3. So many times during editing/cretion of new ads the system just logs me out. I would expect it out of a new system in beta, not a system that is in production state by a company worth more than disney and which makes its money from advertising (basically from adwords)

4. Submitted over 2000 phrases (most are multiple words and not very competitive) in many different fields. More than 98% of them require me to raise tyhe "minimum bid" to well over 20 cents. Some are $1 and above. I must say that I would not complain so much if I got anything close to that when people click on our adsense ads, but we don't so.. what is the deal with this minimum bid? Are there really so many people out there willing to pay $5 for clicks on ads that are related to "xxasdf zaurus"? If so - send them my way

Maybe we shouldn't complain? after all, as the saying goes "you get what you pay for"? but then again, we do pay quite enough, no?

[idotcom]

This is ofcourse about money. Look at all the big boys... they're all in a race for king of the hill. The 5.00 minimum bid thing is absolutely rediculous. Think about the not so savvy people using adwords... they see this and they probably think there is no other quick option, so they do it... and now, like suckers, they're paying 5.00 a click on words they were paying .20 cent on.

I mean they deactivate keywords because they're not of quality... so how does increasing cost by 4.80 make it quality?

What a scam.... HURRY UP YAHOO.... You got a chance to cash in on google's greed.

I think I'm going to close my adwordsandpayhigh account.