Hi When I logged onto my adwords account I was shocked and found many of my keywords were inactive as the minimum bid has jumped from 0.05 to $5. This is happening with more than one product. Any one having this similar situation ? Please let me know. Thanks.
As info has said, it's very common. It's an issue of the Quality Score that google uses to evaluate the ads it shows. It 'punishes' ads it doesn't like but upping the costs. The most common reasons for the cost going up are low ctr, and lack of immediate relevancy on the landing page. To get the price down again, you need to tie in the relevancy of your keywords, ad text and landing page.
You may check your quality score ... does it go from great to ok ... or poor ? Fix whatever you did with your landing page. Hopefully they will re-evaluate and lower your cost.
As I'm sure others haved noted, increase the relevancy of your add to the landing page the ad leads to. You may need to create many landing pages (one for each various type of ad) so that the content of the ad matches the content of the landing page extremely well. good luck
You're shocked? How about the dude that was spending $150k per month and received the Google slap too. WTH is Google thinking? I especially enjoyed reading Google shares plummet after disappointing earnings yesterday. From the article: "the number of paid clicks on the Web sites operated by Google and its partners during the second quarter fell 1 percent from the first quarter, the first sequential downturn that the company has ever reported in the category". So the idiots start slapping everyone to the point where some keywords have no advertisers and business suffers. Who would have known...
I read on a stock site that they think they may have slapped accounts a bit too hard. They're going to learn the hard way that when you dick around your customers, (adwords users), you're going to screw yourself. When you don't meet analysts expectations, your stock price drops. It's been that way since the stock markets began! I think they may lighten up on the slaps, but Google is stuck between surfers figuring out those are ads they're clicking on and adwords users just leaving them for greener pastures.
The problem is, there are businesses that are run that have decisions being made by people who only look at numbers. In Google's case I think this is opposite. Why would any sane executive allow a company to punish another company that has been paying them 150K per month? "So they’ll send free traffic from their organic search results, but will not let me pay them to be in AdWords." This is what I was thinking about when they started to ban the water for gas ads. Think about it, water4gas never needs to spend a dime again. Whoever at Google that is making these sort of decisions needs to be fired immediately. Funny thing is, that $150K article came out right around the time one of my campaigns was running, and I somehow avoided the slap at that time. The LP I ran, certainly was of no quality, yet I stayed alive.
I agree the Google slap is too harsh. Google seems to penalise broad keywords, even if they are performing well. I think google should use conversion statistics as well as what they already use to determine QS. A clients campaign of mine has a broad keyword that is quite profitable, but is of "poor quality", when quite obviously, people are using that term to find my clients services, and it is most definately not unrelated even though it is broad. I should qualify the above statement by saying I have managed a lot of Adword spending and I know how to optimise campaigns.
Mine is a disappointing story. I spent about 9 months trying to do affiliate marketing with Google adwords, but no success. I have tried everything to improve my quality scores for my keywords - making sure it's in the URL, in the heading, in the ad, in the landing page; but still Google deemed them 'poor' and increased the bids. That has happened to me over and over again in many different campaigns. So I gave up A.M. and moved on. A few days ago, a friend insisted, I should do it again. So I launched a couple of campaigns, and met with the same problem, or rather slaps from Google. One keyword - one campaign - one ad to ensure relevancy and still Google is asking too much for the keyword. There are only two advertisers. So I have concluded that "I just don't get it". Am I stupid or is there something really wrong with Google? When I read success stories of other affiliates making money with adwords, sometimes I think there is something that they know that I don't. Ok. so somebody said - use long tail keywords. But if that keyword is not used by anyone in search, then I get punished again by Google - because they think since my ad is not being displayed through that keyword, I should be punished. And there - the minimum bid goes up again! Regardless, the bottom line is - Google Always Wins!
The idea behind this is to weed out the crap. There are A LOT of inexperienced people jumping into Adwords and it just makes the relevancy(and perceived quality of the ads) worse for everyone when they spray their bad ads and bad landing pages for bad products around everywhere. I personally like what Google is doing because you can be somewhat assured that the ads that are there are usually legit offerings. This helps everyone but those looking for a quick buck.
As many have said already; you have been Google "Slapped". Now, the chances of recovering your domain to a penny CPC again is EXTREMELY difficult. Even re-doing your landing page and improving your AD will not do it. You best bet would be to open up a new domain. But try to overcome the slap first
You're not alone and you're certainly not stupid. First thing you need to do is stop believing all those "super marketing" bloggers and E-Book authors who are really making their selling people crappy e-books on how to waste their money with Adwords. 99.9% of them are totally full of hot air and when you see a marketing guru who posts pictures of their checks or post their earnings totals, run away as fast as you can because they're no better than the con artists who would try to get you into some sleazy MLM like Reverse Funnel System. I love how allthe gurus will tell you how much they make but never even give you a hint about how they're making this imaginary money. You should try reading this article before you think of throwing in the towel. I spent two years losing money with Adwords and YPN before I reinvented my strategy and started using organic SEO only to drive traffic. It takes more time and effort but once you get the ball rolling, you'd be suprised how mucch you can make for virtually no cost for advertising, etc. And, this forum DP is one of the best learning sources. Plenty of very nice people here will tell you the real facts and inside secrets for nothing but to help other people along. Who needs E-Books when you have DP ?
It's a very common problem, there is something that you are doing with your campaigns that google doesn't like.
This is very common to the novice and newbie adwords users. The problem is poor landing pages, non targeted text ads, poorly chosen keywords and improperly structured accounts. Its impossible to pinpoint the exact problem without looking at your account and landing pages, but if you want me to take a look drop me a PM.