Minimum bids increased 20x overnight

Sometime yesterday (April 5th), I had my best (most traffic) keywords increase in minimum bid anywhere from 5-20x. This is across 600+ adgroups (in hundreds of campaigns across 10 linked adwords accounts - using "my client center"). We're talking thousands of keywords - and huge jumps - they used to be minimum bids of ~$0.10. Now they've jumped anywhere from $0.50 to $5.00 - overnight.

The keywords are all related by industry - but it seems so strange - that's like saying if the industry is "electronics," campaigns on various types of "stereo equipment" and "cell phones" were affected - both groups are "electronics" but not all that related, yet the price hikes are across the board.

Anyone have this happen to them too?
Any thoughts on what happened? BigDaddy (Big Daddy) related?

Thanks for your insights.

 

All is normal here across thousands of ad groups and tens of thousands of keywords.

 

As an AdSense publisher I've noticed ~ $1.00 - $1.50 ePCM increase since the beginning of April. I'm averaging about 3-4 times what I've usually made over the past 2 years.

So, as you may think, I'm very excited about it and have noticed that Google must've done something to increase the average min. bid.

 

Or maybe it was the advertisers....

 

Yes - in other forums the messages are being posted I estimate at the rate of one per minute on this subject. The gigantic kwd increases has happened to me over the last 3 -4 weeks. There is some evidence that Google (wihout ever admitting it) has donen some changes to reduce this massive increase. ( I recently had some KWDS inactive because they wanted 1.00 to 5.00 --- all of al sudden become active again.) Check other forums.

 

Thanks for the feedback - please keep it coming!

GuyFromChicago - let me know if you notice any changes.

jfontestad - do you use Adwords as well? Have you seen hikes in your min. bids there?

I plan on watching my Adsense account closely - if eCPM goes up 5x, then there is the theory that Google needs to report bigger revenue numbers, so as everyone bids more in Adwords, everyone gets more in Adsense, but Google gets that bigger number on the revenue side for their investors.

If then, you drive traffic to your site with Adwords, and derive revenue from Adsense, you'd hope that your margins would stay the same (or at least proportionately similar).

So far, I haven't seen that happen, but I'm willing to give it a week or so before I start getting worried.

 

CPCTROUBLE - do you have links to those other forums that you could paste here? I'd love to read them.

 

Mine have still stayed around the same price

 

http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum81/7895.htm

 

CPCTROUBLE - thanks for that link! That forum is contending it's a Quality Score issue, but that doesn't seem to make much sense. Also some of them seem to have seen their min bid prices go back down... I'd like to hope that will happen to me as well, but I guess we'll have to wait and see.

While unfortunate that this is happening to other people as well, it's nice to know I'm not the only one it is happening to.

I'd love to hear from anyone who has a theory as to why/what is going on.

The more I look at the issue, the less I think it has to do with my particular industry... so then what determines which of my keywords jump in price?

For example, if my industry is health care, I've seen things happen where the keyword "lasik" stays the same, but "Chicago lasik" jumps in price... Sure, Chicago is a proper name, but if "Seattle lasik" doesn't jump in price, you can't claim it's just proper names or across a particular industry.

 

From here:

More info:

Keyword States and Quality-Based Minimum Bids

Quality Score

 

GuyFromChicago - Thanks for the links to information on Quality Score.

However, I think you might have misunderstood my question (or I didn't frame it well enough):
I've had these keywords, with good placement and good performance for about a year now. They have been pointing to the same static html pages on my site the entire time, and changes to the pages over the course of the year have increased the quality of the content on those pages.

That said, then it is reasonable to assume, based upon the Google guidelines you pointed out, that the Qualilty Score of my keywords wouldn't be the issue - the Quality Score should have been slowly, but steadily IMPROVING over the course of the year (I have performance data supporting that notion).

So my question remains: Why, within 24 hours, with all other variables being equal (which they were), would the top traffic receiving and top performing few thousand keywords (out of tens of thousands), all of a sudden have a preposterous jump in minimum cpc?

I don't the answer is as simple as pointing to Quality Score.

Thanks for the feedback - keep it coming! I think the collective brainpower here has a lot of good ideas.

 

I've never had a keyword's min bid jump 20X overnight. Never. If it happened to me I think I'd be scratching my head as well.

Do you have access to another AdWords account (not tied to your primary) where you could create a new ad group and see what the min bid would be for those keywords? Have you tried rainsing the min bid based on Google's suggestion to see what the actual cpc is coming in at?

 

GuyFromChicago: those are great ideas.

I currently don't have another AdWords account to test with at the moment, but I'll look into it.

The idea to try paying their higher minimums and see what the actual CPC comes out to be is a great idea too. I've got an email into AdWords support, so I'm going to wait for their response before I try your idea, but that will be my next course of action, pending the Google response...

Has anyone who's experiencing this issue as well tried what GuyFromChicago suggested?

 

Could it be due to a new advertising or business coming in?

Like take Service Magic for example - you know, those companies that take your name and send you the names of 3 contractors. That company advertises in many catergories - like every niche of service or contracting.

Now, take landscape for example. Or tree work. Many bids used to go at about 10 cents ot 50 cents per click.

Then on Overture a year or two ago, I noticed that Service Magic - or the like - was bidding $3 per click, and everyone in second and third place was at 50 cents and 51 cents.

Do you think it could be due to a company like that coming in fresh, or coming in high on everything.

You see, in our industry, they never got hit with the $3 because the system always drops them to 1 cent over the next highest bid - which was 51 cents. So they were basically just intimidating everyone.

So another landscape company owner and myself, went in and raised all of our bids to $2.99 per click. That way we gave a black eye to the company at $3 per click. Now they could not drop any lower on a click, and our ads would drop down to 52 cents; one cent over the third place 51 cent bid company.

But we made sure to check the system every week to make sure that number 3 didn't catch-on and come up to $2.98 per click to nail us.

We spread news of what we were doing in the tree service and landscaping forums so that other landscapers would do the same in their regions and cities.

I can only wish to have seen the expression on the face of the highest bidders management when their Adwords bill soared through the roof.

 

mdvaden - I don't think that's the case - this issue happened to numerous people on April 5th (presumably in various markets). There's a lively thread over at Webmasterworld - the link is earlier in this thread - which chronicles the issue.

As of yet, there are no solutions or any definitive word from Google addressing the issue.

 

I am seeing wide variations between three sites with similar campaigns. What I noticed on the two older sites (one is a news aggegator, one is a software configuration site) have decent pagerank and saw no real change in minimum bid. The third site (a similar news aggegator) had it's page rank go to 0 about a month ago and this week bids went up 50x to 100x on most keywords.

I set up the second news site to experiment with SEO, page layout, CSS improvements, and made some database improvements. I was receiving better CTR and eCPM on the second site. This is the site that saw some minimums go from 0.05 to 5.00 or 10.00.

Google wouldn't give me specifics on what would be the cause of the high prices but here's my thoughts:

1. Content is the same as the other, older site (I have revised to make the sites not have the exact same 20 stories per page)
2. They don't like the way I used CSS. I coded the template for my pages with the important things (title, content, etc) at the top and lesser things at the bottom (banner ads, search box, etc) and then use CSS to position the elements in a user friendly manner. I was lead to believe that this would be good for the bots as they are looking for content to index in the first couple hundred lines so having banner ads at theend of the source code would be a good thing. I suspect there may be something in my CSS they don't like.

I had been pausing Adwords campaigns to the old aggegation site and turning them to the new site. When I saw the increase in cost on the new site, I un-paused campaigns on the old site to keep traffic and business flowing. When my page rank comes back on my new site, I'll see if I can confirm my theory of PageRank (and Quality Score) as being the high minimum bid trigger.