What`s happening with Adwords?

When I lived in San Francisco, they called them "seismic events" - a fancy, less scary word for earthquakes.

Has Google radically changed the rules of the game for Adwords? I`ll be the first to say I don`t know exactly what`s happening, but early reports lead me to think they`re targeting advertisers who are running lead generation web sites...with massive rate increases.

Speculation is not going to answer the question, but maybe collectively we can figure out what`s going on...

If you`re an Adwords advertiser and Google has dramatically changed your deal recently (from booting you off the system to radically increasing your pay per click rate) and you want to add to the common wisdom, describe what happened below.

Most important, what was on your landing page? "Normal" content? Content plus a strong opt-in offer? A page designed exclusively to get opt-ins?

It seems from what I`ve heard so far that Google has targeted pages that are set up soley to get opt-ins.

IF YOU`VE BEEN DIRECTLT EFFECTED, please share your story and maybe a common pattern will emerge... If you haven`t been effected, please don`t post speculations so we can keep the thread clear for factual information. Thanks.

Comments

[Matt]

Well, about 2 weeks ago, conversions went into the dumpster and my cost about doubled. I have real content, little to no affiliate links and I sell real products and services. I make a specific product for each state but I've noticed that conversions are TERRIBLE when I send a client to a landing page, so I've been sending them to my homepage and conversions went through the roof (of course, until the recent change). I think google messed around with the algorithm that sets ranking and price and has skyrocketed the cost of keywords that don't have *Specific* content on the landing page.

Again, when I do have specific content, sales are terrible, so I'm in a real bind here. Actually thinking of taking my 7K/month I spend on google and just pile it into SEO.

~Matt

[stephen goldberg]

i have stopped running ads with google i just cant take there bullshit

[Saumil Patel]

Well, I read a very informative report on the new Adwords changes .. you can download it for free at http://www.wuranga.com/reports/googleslap/

get it .. its worth it !

[Kevin Wright]

Yes, it seems rates have gone through thru the roof. Either I am missing the boat, or Google is really price gouging. I have many ads running for my wife's website. What use to cost 5 to 10 cents, is now 50 cents to a $1+.

There is one specific ad and keyword the really bugs me, because the cost is a buck a click, or it disables. Yet we are the only ones that even come up when that keyword is used, plus my ad copy matches the keyword. How can they justify charging me a buck, when I am the only one that comes up under that keyword, and my ad copy matches, etc.? The same ad/key words with Yahoo only cost me about 15 cents.

I am looking for alternative methods to gain targeted leads. Any ideas, I would like to hear them, thanks.

[Thomas R. Schombert]

I have personally been effected by what ever it is that is going on in the internet service to include the declide of clients due to changes and other unknown things that have changed within the internet. I pay to have leads to my site and have found an increased drop of in clients and calls as well in my listed in the local phone books as well. I guess if I don't pay like the big dogs then I will be pushed aside. I can guarantee that I will not be renewing my services again in the coming renewal season. Biggest waste of money I have ever spent.

[Ken]

I think you've answered your own question, Kevin: Take your business to Yahoo, MSN, and others. If more would do the same, Google would wise up.

[Ben]

I have two adwords accounts. ONe I used heavily and the other just barely. Both have been indexed by the evil bot.

My heavily used account was pretty much disabled and so I just took the 30 best keywords and put them in the other account w/ a re-direct url. Things are pretty much back on track. Prices are a bit higher, but not too badl

[Scott]

I experienced the same problem many are reporting but managed to get it resolved along with the assistance of my adwords rep.

According to Google they have begun to review and rank the landing page in addition to the ad.

You can no longer have one display URL and send the user to a different URL. Correcting this one issue enabled me to get our campaign rereviewed and restrictions released.

My cost per click has gone way done and my conversion remains excellent.

Other issues that I was informed ( by the Google rep) that are being reviewed:

* The landing page must provide some real, relevant information, directly related to the keyword. Not just a teaser to collect names.

* Long form sales letters with no pictures are also being penalized. According to Google these type of pages do not provide the users with a good experience.

While I can not speak definatively, it appears to me that an informative page on the subject at hand optimized to collect opt ins is the best solution to this issue.

Again, time will tell but this seems to be working for us.

Regards, Scott

[Anonymous]

One way to get Google to wake up.....

Spread it around that everyone should boycott the google income flow mechanism...It is simple really...

When you do a search on google....and see something that interests you in the sponsored listings, don't click it. don't go there.

If you recognize the company and can identify where the sponsered listing came from, then contact them directly by telephone and explain to them that you do not make use of Google, that they are wasting their time advertising on Google, besides it is too expensive anyway.

If enough of us do that, google.com will feel the boycott and take appropriate steps to bring their prices in line with industry standards.

[Sam]

Hi Ken,

I've seen some changes in my Adwords. The prices have risen some and the impressions have gone down some. This is on largely single page sales sites.

I read a very good study on the topic a few days ago. It can be picked up here: http://www.information-illimited.com/GoogleSlapReport1.pdf

I hope it helps some folks.

Sam
http://www.internethowtovideos.com
http://www.flashvideorevealed.com

[Peter Dudek]

On July 11, Google hit me with minimum bids of between $1/click and $11/click. I had previously been paying between 12 - 14 cents and was in 2nd position of the PPC for most of my keywords. I had an average CTR of 12.8% and 10.42% for the two main keywords of my main site.

My landing page was a testimonial type page with a link to the main product page. There were no squeeze pages involved--in fact, there were no attempts to gather email addresses on either page.

FYI: In the past year, I've spent over $100,000 on Google Ads. I'm not just a hobbiest or a part-timer. Internet marketing is my full-time income to support our six children. Google's actions are threatening the safety and well-being of my family!

After several emotional phone calls to Google, I was told that the robots had determined that my landing page was "poor."

I got details from the human about what was wrong. I "fixed" my page. (What I did at Google's suggestion was to eliminate the two-step approach of going from a testimonial page to a product page. I made the product page be the landing page.)

After fixing my page, I requested a human review to see if my changes were sufficient.

I was told that they were not. I asked what more could I do? They said they couldn't tell me what to do but that I should "try to think of ways to enhance my user's experience."

So I had added Live Chat, a free video and a series of 7 free advice emails all without any obligation to buy. The only way I could do anything more for my visitors would be to give them my product for free.

I called Google to see if that was sufficient. They told me NO! And would give no explaination as to why!

The fact that I have spent so much money with them didn't matter.

The fact that the "improvements" to my site sent my conversion ratio from 3.03% to 1.74% didn't matter.

So now, all of my affiate campaigns are out of business. My main deal with my own product is limping along with Yahoo traffic. I have no idea why Google is treating me so terribly. But if anyone wants to work together to figure this out and find a solution: COUNT ME IN!

I want to be a part of this discussion!
peterdudek@comcast.net

[Eran Malloch]

I run a big campaign for 1 client in particular (he spends $10-15K/month) and I have found that any new ad groups I set up are having huge problems getting keywords to activate.

The minimum bid price to get them working seems to be in the $12.91 a click for these ads, which is mega scarey stuff.

I tested a theory that just cos it cost that much to activate, Goog wouldn't actually charge me that price, but unfortunately I was wrong!!!!!!!!!! :-(

My landing pages are all a short sales letter encouraging visitors to register to attend a free seminar. We collect name, email address & let them choose a time & place for their preferred seminar from a drop-down box.

Conversion aint great at the best of times, but unfortunately, we know from real testing that NOT collecting an opt-in booking on the landing page drops overall conversion & cost per lead down big time.

I have sent adwords support emails about this, but all i get back is a cut & paste job from support - they just keep repeating themselves with that same stuff that won't work for us.

No way do we want to NOT collect an opt-in. It's a HUGE waste of PPC money if you don't collect that.

I have tried pulling out specific keywords & building a unique landing page just around that kw combo and it has worked, but it would take me YEARS to convert my client's ad campaign over to this system, so it's totally impractical to do.

I am moving a lot of their ad spend over to Overture/Yahoo at the moment, which are a total pain to use as well, but at least they don't seem to penalise for collecting an opt-in. Plus, in general, they are cheaper clicks, even though their traffic is much lower as well...

I have heard a rumour that this is all part of goog's plan to move everybody across to CPA (cost per action) instead of CPC. Apparently to help beat click fraud issues.

Whatever their plan is, I just hope this gets sorted asap, cos I am having to almost put everything on hold at the moment.

[Ken McCarthy]

Wow!

Thanks guys. This is a lot of information and I`m sure people who are in the middle of this thing are finding it useful. I know I am.

Keep it coming...

[Ken Calhoun]

Hi Ken,

What I've found is that I've had to do much more testing on my adwords campaigns to get maximum CTR percentages from them.

This is because from what I've seen in my tests, Google has definitely made it such that higher-CTR vs lower-CTR ads are shown in top vs bottom slots, and pricing on keywords varies dramatically depending on the type of landing page that traffic is being sent to. So I think that's factored into the k/w pricing as well as ranking algorithms. Interesting stuff.

I'm shifting most of my ppc budget to overture/msn til I get more data; minimizing google ad spends for now.

Ken Calhoun
http://www.WinningAdwords.com
http://www.CopywritingUniversity.com

[Bruce Lamb]

We have lots of adwords campaigns for our clients. We augment our natural search engine placement with a bit of Adwords for some of the search phrases for which we aren't hitting first page natural placement. This ppc expense is on our dime -- not mandated by any of our agreements with our clients -- so we always watch the rates we are paying very closely, and will move budget from Adwords to Yahoo! Search and back again depending on where we can get the best value for our budget. I've checked the past two weeks' results and the previous two weeks results (and the previous two weeks before that, as well, just to be safe) and the cost per click is almost identical between all three time periods. This sampling is over 18 different campaigns, so it has some built-in randomness. As such -- at least in our industry (we have lots of real estate clients) -- I don't see any algorithm changes affecting our cost per click.
All that being said, we get a lot of clients coming to us for natural search engine marketing services because they are paying a fortune in pay-per-click -- and the rates they pay are likely to go up over time as competition increases.
Just my $0.02 (CDN) worth!

[donisadreamer]

I have been using Google for 18 months. I have hired consultants who ripped me off. I do it myself now but am haphazard at best. I have something good going but to reach the next level are there any honest pay per click managers out there who would be willing to help me for a reasonable fee. Just one of you nice people who knows the ropes would be fine. Thanks

[Charlie]

Hi,

I run a lot of Adwords/Adsense campaigns. Most are content article based sites with rss feeds, etc. For 1 main campaign, my Adwords bids were at .05-.15 each. Now minimums all are at .50 - $1 or more. I did not change my bid. I am still getting some impressions, but only about 3% of what I had been. My click rate has actually gone up just a touch, now at 3.4%.
On the Adsense end, I am getting about 5% of the page impressions I had been at. CTR is about the same as it had been (17-20%).
I do have a Yahoo account, but have not been using it. Guess it's time to take a look at it again. Charlie

[Joe Stewart]

Hi Ken,

I got the boot too, but, unlike last summer, I didn't have all of my eggs in one basket.

My campaign got shut down in three seperate waves over a period of a couple weeks. No big deal as I was testing a landing page and basically doing Adsense arbitrage. I was pretty much breaking even on cost and getting all of my opt-ins for free, but oh, well. This is what Google does.

I'd really like to see Yahoo and/or MSN start taking more chances and coming up with more unique ideas instead of chasing Google. Why not lead instead of follow? Am I mistaken or wasn't it MSN that first introduced the "Dayparting" feature? The next thing you know Google was scrambling to get that set up in their system.

Right now it seems that there's just no one out there to "keep them honest" so we're pretty much at their mercy, but I, like many others, am leaning toward more SEO and doing business with the "other guys".

I'm personally getting pretty tired of Google.

Regards,

Joe

[Tony Ryan]

On April 5 probably 90% my 5c clicks on one campaign went to $1-$10. My spend dropped from $2k a month to $200. It's now down to $100.

Landing pages contained just an article and Adsense. No opt-in.

Perhaps G targeted non-US accounts back then to test the waters. There have been no significant changes this month.

[Daniel Falk]

My site's pages have been labelled "low-quality landing pages" by Google, and the vast majority of my keywords have been disabled unless I bid $5-$10 in most cases (I was bidding 20 cents - 50 cents).

The site has a substantial amount of quality original content on every page which directly addresses the ad contents, so it wasn't a question of relevancy in my case.

The site has no forced opt-in, nor any advertising of any kind. It did, however, have an option to opt-in to a newsletter for more information... and from talking with Google representatives on the phone on several occasions about this I gathered it was the existence of ANY kind of opt-in form, coupled with the competitiveness of some of my keywords, that caused the labelling. The site was built with software, SEO-Website-Builder, using one of their standard templates... and this may have been a factor as well, I'm not sure. Google commented that it had the "look" of a low-quality site, whatever that means.

In spite of spending close to $10k per month with Google on Adwords, the Google representatives that would talk with me were amazingly unhelpful, would provide absolutely no specifics on the problem or possible solutions, and simply pointed to the Landing Page Quality Guidelines and kept insisting that this is an automated decision process by their software and cannot be reversed without making changes to the site of an unspecified nature.

I do not believe this is a ploy by Google to simply get more money out of advertisers, but an honest attempt at improving the quality of ads and landing pages of paid advertisers as they are always trying to do for organic results.

Unfortunately, many people such as myself are undeservedly being caught in their "dragnet". Any automated decision will always have collateral damage.

[Peter Dudek]

Daniel,

Having found myself in a very similar position to yours, I find your attitude much more generous and philosophical than I am capable of. My hat's off to you.

Your comment that Google representatives are "amazingly unhelpful" is exactly right.

I could NOT persuade anyone there to discuss reality, statistics or facts in any way. They are not much better than the copy/paste policy statements they parrot idiotically.

Oh how I WISH there was a valid alternative to Google! How quickly a trusted and valued source of business has become a callous adversary! I am truly astonished at Google's hateful attitude toward us!

[Michael Thompson Jr]

The BIG bad wolf can always do what he wants when he RUNS the forest. What your seeing now is almost what you saw several years ago with Microsoft and all of their "Monopoly of the marketplace" issues. Google controls so much market share, that they can institute changes without regard to their customers. They know you can't go anywhere else if you want to focus on targeted traffic that goes through the largest search engine machine on the planet. Take your business to Yahoo, and MSN...hurt them in the pocket(if that's possible) Don't put your eggs in one basket, get creative. Maybe this will force marketers to come up with more creative ways to generate traffic. It's just so funny, a company that is the stock market darling of the last decade, and is under immense pressure to generate HUGE quarterly cash flow would bite the hands of advertisers that are puting Billions in their pocket? Don't succumb to the big bad wolf, there are other ways to generate traffic people!

[Terrance S.]

Hey Guys. Very, very interesting topic.

I wanted to take a few moments and just switch your thinking view from a "business" or an "internet marketer "to just a plain average web surfer who knows nothing about opt-ins or leads.

As an everyday average non-business website viewer, most people search for Google looking for information first.

They are not looking to place their names and email addresses in a box before they get the information they are looking for.
They are looking for information first.

Google and the others were slowly moving their search engines to a "more content friendly" websites" ( even with the adword lead in)

Google understands that in order for it to remain in good standing with its viewers, that it must give them the what they really want which is information first.

If Im searching for information on how to stop my dog from barking,( as a everyday web surfer) I dont want to place my name and email address in the box first before I get my information.

Now granted, if I like the information ( and not a sales letter or regurgitated super basic information but REAL stuff) then I could be inclined to place my name and email address on the website later in the website.

This is where I believe that Google is aiming for. They don't want people to feel frustrated

Thats why you see them slowly trying to phase out many of the so called internet marketing type of strategies ( pop ups, multiple affiliate ads for the same product and unfortunately landing pages)

I think part of the solution is to start moving towards quality content focused websites and using opt ins on each page but very discreetly and used to enhance the Google websurfer.

Just my opinion from another point of view

[Adrian Bold]

There's so much of this (AdWords Pain) being written about at the moment. I wonder if Google realise (care) about how many genuine businesses and individuals are being hurt by this continual experimenting with 'quality'.

The problem here in the UK is that they are just so dominant with search volume. I think the US is marginally better with Yahoo and MSN but at the moment they have just under 80% of search traffic. I wish the competition were better.

I've also played email tennis with the support reps but it was only after my 4th email that I realised I had been communicating with a robot calling itself Deirdre. Of course, robots have no emotion or common sense. Pity.

Spread the word and use Copernic Agent for a better search experience!

[Brian]

I found from the off, that Google adwords via Google.co.uk, were always twice the price of the cts from bidavertiser, which I found much easier to use and half the price.

When it come down to it, Relavent page Content is going to win in the long run.
All the adword companies will make things more difficult and want more of the action.
Like everything in this world, if they think you are making a bob or two they'll want some of the action, which eventually kills it in the end.

I built my site using SiteBuild It

http://myss.sitesell.com/Brian90.html
which seems the only way to go in the long term.