I have several adword campaigns and recenty noticed that all my keywords for the campaign www.polereversal.com were deactivated. To activate the again most keywords were now over 5.00 per click. The average price in the past I was paying was .10cents. Just for fun I placed the same keywords in different campaign that points to a different website. To my surprise the same keywords are back to .10cents. I have tried to delete the campaign and create a new one but the same thing happens...all the keyword have a huge min bid when pointing to www.polereversal.com Example - The key word "mayan calendar" has a min bid now of 5.00 for my campaign site www.polereversal.com The same keyword "mayan calendar" has a bid price of .05 cents under the campaign www.reefclubresort.com Note: Both campaigns are "Google search" only. I am not paying for ads on search partners, etc. Why are the same keyword prices different per campaign? The only difference seems to be the site each campaign is for.
Google checks the quality score for each site. Most likely your concersion rate and quality score for your first website started to become bad.
And google will check your title, description on meta tags too. Keyword relevency is also one of the fector.
Ok - I must be missing something here! What is this quality score eveyone keeps pointing to? I thought the cost of a keyword was based on the average price everyone was willing to pay per click. It makes no sense to me that I would have to pay 10.00 per click for a certain keyword while someones else can buy the same keyword for .10 cents per click.
Forget quality score. Just remember that 1. your keyword(s) should be present in your ad. 2. Most important is that you have a sub-domain/domain named similar to keyword. 3. Above 1-2 will improve your quality score. higher CTR also improves quality score. I have mentioned all these in details at my site. 01adwords.com
Apologies in advance for shouting... DO NOT IGNORE QUALITY SCORE! Apologies once again. If you are remotely serious about Adwords, it should be the centre of your universe. It affects pretty much everything. The better your QS, the higher you appear for the same bid (or the less you pay to appear in the same position, if you prefer). The better your QS, the lower your minimum bid. The two main factors to improve your quality score are the Clickthrough Rate and the relevance of the advert text. These have both been discussed extensively on this forum, but in summary, you want the highest clickthrough rate you can get (within your given position), and you want the keyword to appear in the top line of the advert (usually). So make the advert compelling and relevant to what you do. If you want more information on this, see my blog. Cianuro and GuyFromChicago both have good blogs as well on this sort of thing...
I wrote a post on another forum at the beginning of the year regarding this ongoing problem. Basically, G-adwords has "killed" your domain name. Very few people have been able to recover their low bids by working on their current website quality and/or ads. It would be simplier for you to buy a new domain name that is close to your other domain name and copy & paste the complete website onto your new domain name. Here's a few highlights from my other post that may help: *Make sure the domain name is Brand Spanking New -- Do a history check on it. G-adwords has been doing the Quality Score thing almost long enough that people may be letting "killed" URL's lapse, so you could possibly buy one that G-adwords has decided it's baaaad. If you do get one, your ad(s) could still be made inactive. Pause the Old, high cost campaign. And start a new campaign and ... When you load the keywords bid reallllly low. (They'll come back inactive, but you should be given really low bids to activate them). Make sure your new URL has the niche subject within it OR, create a directory specifically for the niche and topic you are advertising. For instance New ad URL can be: GeneralTopic.com/AdNiche/ Do this for each page you advertise. It also helps if your page's title has the ad's major keyword in it as well as the Description and the first heading. Google's spider "supposedly" reads these (I have my doubts) and will give you lower bids. If you do the above, your ads will activate at low bids -- but that doesn't necessarily mean they will show. You'll have to bid high enough to be competitive -- but DO start out low, then adjust back up to what you had been paying before, possibly a few cents higher. Good luck until the next Algo check -- every 2-3 months? -- Then you'll probably have to do it again, and again, and again.... OR ... This will only get your Ads active again rather quickly BUT, since your pages/site content was deemed "low quality" there is a very good possibility they will go inactive again even on the "new" domain. So... After you get them active at the low bids, start editing your content and website based on the new requirements. Then, maybe the next time they do an algo update, yours will pass. Hope this helps.
I agree with Manx. Good QS help you have lower bid keywords. If you make sure your adwords account is fine, then you make sure your particular domain is fine with google. If that domain is fine with google, then make sure each landing page has basic SEO to meet stardard.
ecollier, you have fallen victim to Google's misleading advertising. The word 'bid' is particularly misleading. I started a campaign at 5p/click and it worked for a day. On many of the keywords, nobody else was bidding. Next day I find all my keywords are inactive and the cost has doubled. In fact the cost per click depends on this mysterious thing called 'quality score' and they wont give you the formula for how its worked out. What other people are prepared to bid seems pretty much irrelevant. In your case, your website seems to be about the reversals in the suns magnetic field, which is interesting, but it looks like you are not actually selling anything. I wonder if that is a factor (but why should google care?)
This blog may help: http://www.epiphanysolutions.co.uk/...your-adverts-position-and-why-it-matters.html It explains how Adwords uses your quality score to adjust your bid. For what my opinion's worth, I think it's a very good idea - it means that relevant products and sites have to pay less than others. It's good for us, because we know how to get a good QS. It's good for searchers, because they get more appropriate results. The only criticism I could have is that it could be more effective - there are plenty of people that pay way over the odds to advertise, and drive up the cost of PPC for everyone...
I have a number of domains and I know the "domain killed" experience. I moved some pages to an older (maybe authority) site and the $10 bids moved down to $0.05 or lower. I have created new domains but made the mistake of using some free content and got killed. On other new domains free content worked fine, the difference was that on the killed site, the content was used by 20 or more other sites while the non-killed sites only had 5 or less duplicates. If you have old domains, try them out.
Google deciding how 'quality' your destination site is total arrogance on their part. The only person qualified to determine that is the person who clicked through your ad. If they click through, buy, and the advertiser makes money, it's a quality ad and a quality site. The market will controll itself. If I sell blue widgets, bid on blue widgets, and pay for clicks from blue widgets keywords, if I don't sell any blue widgets then my ad will come down becasue I'll stop spending money on it. If I make money on the ad, I'll keep it up. It's inappropriate for Google to take that power away from the merchants and the consumers.
I'm fairly new to internet marketing but have studied Adwords, Adsense, Content-rich web sites and pre-selling extensively for about a year now. I was, and to some degree still am, in favour of the Quality Score idea to ensure useful information appears on the web, not just trashy sales letters or mail-squeeze pages, BUT I am pleased to see someone else who shares my view that the market needs to be the decider of what is quality and what isn't. NOT Google alone. As this quote so clearly puts it, "if I don't sell any blue widgets then my ad will come down" Just this last week I went though the exercise of ignoring all the content-rich and pre-sell approach just as an experiment. I picked me a topic (at random) went to Clickbank and picked a couple of "products" to market and wrote a couple of optimised adword ads to cycle. I did all the right things with the ads - you know - keywords in the title and body and url etc etc, went to the sales page and got about 150 of the most relevant keywords for that site and went to publish .... WHAM ! Minimum bid for any word $5 with 90% at $10 Yeah right ! $10 a click for a $19.95 e-book ? I DON'T think so ! So ... to cut a long story short I had a four-email conversation with Adword-support to eventually extract from them the fact that the landing page was what was causing the exhorbitant minimum bid because ... So essentially no-one can ever afford to market this person's e-book no matter how good bad or indifferent it may be !
Google's market position relies entirely on people using their search engine. If another engine consistently delivers more relevant results, people will start using it instead. Google have to try to deliver relevant results in order to keep their position in the market - in the main part it works.
OK thats by no means odd, some keywords are just priced differently because of the competition... Josiah