Google's new landing page algorithm causing $10 minimum bids on thousands of sites!

Right .. So you invested 9999 and got back 10000 ?

Spending them on what ?

 

Its all about Content! if your landing page is simply just a redirect, you are eventually going to get weeded out b/c its so strict at the moment. Google will probably tweak things a bit, but in the meantime, you have to focus on pages that have more than just an ad. You will see your bid minimize if you can do this. Its all about the positive user experience, so if you push for that as well, you should see better bids

(and yes that is a Google foam hand)

 

The POINT of such large upset is that MANY of us experienced marketers DO have content. The LANDING page is what counts......so pricing, product pics, lead forms, etc will be seen right away for conversion rates...the rest of the sites have plenty of content.

Google's jacked this all up by not realizing the IMPORTANCE of a well converting landing page. Seriously...you think this wave of backlash is because we all have our head up our asses? We know what we're doing and we know what Google has done is IDOTIC. They should have approached this totally different.

 

Its all about Content! if your landing page is simply just a redirect, you are eventually going to get weeded out b/c it's so strict at the moment. Google will probably tweak things a bit, but for the mean time you have to focus on pages that are more than just a fancy redirect to ad. You will see your bid minimize if you can do this. Its all about the positive user experience, so if you push for that as well, you should see better bids.

(and Yes that is a Google foam hand)

 

No, my clients are e'commerce stores..it's all about SELLING STUFF. That's why we buy ads on Google. Not to provide users with free information, except that which will help them to make up their minds on what to buy.

Not everyone is an affiliate Adsense MFA type of site...some of us are legit e'commerce sites and many of us got knocked out, too.

If you search for "flying widgets" and you see my ad for flyingwidgets.com, you click on it and you land on my page selling flyingwidgets, I assume you're here to buy flyingwidgets! If I in fact sell you a flyingwidget, then I've done my job...you're happy, I'm happy, but Google's computer THINKS you're unhappy. And that's just dumb.

Plus, its discriminatory against smaller businesses...there are still plenty of affiliate sites up, but they tend to be the big boys.

 

I can hear the guys and gals at Google at Google now -> "Selling stuff? That is so 20th century!"

I bet very few employees at Google have ever sold merchandise - only characters and pixels on computer screens - yet they feel they know best when it comes to YOUR business.

 

I haven't noticed anything yet...

 

Thats what it sounds like if you read the new quality standards... but lets think about this mathmatically for a second.

How much easier is it to handle 1 customer compared to 100?

Lets say you have 100 customers bidding 5 cents on a bunch of related search terms. You tell them all they have to bid $5 from now on if they want to stay.

Only 1 out of 100 customers has to say yes for you to be making the same amount of money and you have 99% less client hassles.

If 2 out of 100 say yes you could have easily instantly doubled your revenues, and probably increased your profits because less clients to support now.

They probably hired a team of Actuaries to do the calculations.

 

Then don't advertise on Google. They want to provide a quality experience to THEIR users. It is nice you want to sell stuff. It is also extremelyt short-sighted and business naive to not understand how these changes benefit you in the long-run. I have explained it several times over now, so I won't bother doing it again.

So what? A buy now button is not a good experience when people are looking for more. It is all fine and good if you want to sell stuff. But if you don't want to create a quality experience for your visitors then you can pedal your wares elsewhere. Just like the upscale mall might not let the guy with the hotdog cart park in the middle of the foodcart, Google is saying we are upgrading our expectations on people who advertise with us.

It is not complicated. So you can be about sales all you want, but you have to realize you don't live in a bubble and Google is under no obligation to sell you ad space.

That is why those of you struggling with this will continue to struggle with this. Most people who do that do not want to buy one of your flying widgets right now. That is the whole point. It is your short-sighted and narrowly focused approach that has delivered a less than satisfying experience to many people that forced Google to make the change.



[quoteIf I in fact sell you a flyingwidget, then I've done my job...you're happy, I'm happy, but Google's computer THINKS you're unhappy. And that's just dumb. [/quote]

That is absolutely not true. Nobody has said that. If you make the sale then that is assumed to be a happy visitor. HOWEVER, almost everyone who clicks on your ad and visits your site will NOT buy a flyingwidget and those customers are potentially unhappy. Those are the ones you have to worry about, because those are the ones who might be buying a flyingwidget tomorrow, next month or next year. Perhaps you care to simply disregard long-term business planning and strategy, but Google does not. So do it at your own peril and own expense.

It takes time, it is a new system. How is it discriminatory against small businesses? You can't prove that any particular segment of the population based on company size was impacted any more or less. It is just wild speculation on your part.

Seriously some of you need to start thinking longer term. Perhaps the ride has been too easy and good and you have never had to do any long-term planning or strategy or worry about keeping customers or repeat visitors. These are issues real businesses have to deal with all the time.

 

That is not true. I am all eyes... But all the arguments I see basically boil down to "put it back meanie google" and not anything based in reality or business sense. Do I think that Google could have managed this change better? Absolutely and without a doubt. Do I think the change was necessary? Absolutely and without a doubt. Problem is some people don't understand or accept why the changes were necessary.

Not sure what you mean here. How are they forcing content down your throat? They are actually giving you a choice. Provide a site with good and relevant keyword content to your search terms or pay a significantly higher price. They could just tell you that you can not buy ads at all. They are not forcing you to do anything. They are simply setting guidelines for their adspace. Just like everyone else in the world does for their adspace.

Ask for a manual review. We can't get bogged down with exceptions here. That is silly. We are talking about millions and millions of websites, almost all of which are not World Class Photography Flash Sites.

They could have handled the transition much better. It was still necessary to make the move and a lot of the people complaining the loudest clearly would not have done anything until they were absolutely forced to, so any kind of pre-planning or warning would have just resulted in more weeks and months of complaining and hand-sitting.

I doubt it is impossible, but it is how they do business. It is how the handle scale for all of their businesses. Quite bluntly, if you don't like their methods you are free to spend your advertising dollars elsehwhere, but they are not likely to quadruple their cost to manage adwords just so you can feel better about it.

For example? What have they told you that contradicted. While we are on it, what inititatives and changes have you taken upon yourself to upgrade your site. Also did you request a manual review, and what was the outcome of that?

I am glad you figured it out. It is not like it was a secret or a mystery. I wish you the best of luck, I truely do. I am just perplexed why it took you more than a few minutes to reach that conclusion. It was pretty obvious from the outset.

It is both funny and depressing you think adding content to your site is stuff your users don't want to see.

Just realize if your only goal is to game the bots so you can get cheaper clicks you will be continually chasing the tail from now until forever.

 

The manual review was a MASSIVE step from Google, and I have to say it makes me a lot happier. AEIOUY, Much of what you say makes sense, but some of it is off the park IMO.

There is not an advertising company in the world that I know of that has a charging scale based on the physical condition of the business (and trust me I do know advertising). The issues I have with the way your replying is the apples and oranges thing. We (and Google) are talking about 'landing PAGE' but you keep referring to 'quality of site', the quality of the site has nothing to do with the quality of the landing page, as the landing page in a PPC campaign is designed to match the advert 100%. ANYONE who is delivering traffic from PPC to a standard website page is losing money (And I will not accept the 'back door shady entrance that was mentioned by you or another, as this is simply not the case) .

Let me give you a scenario that is IMO a perfect analogy. You ask the saleman the price, but he ignores you and continues to sell the product by giving you information. You ask him 'ok but how much is all this gonna cost me?' yet he continues with his sales pitch because BY GOD you WILL listen to everything he has to say. The reality here is that you already have the information you want to make the purchase, and simply want a price. This IMO is a perfect example of the scenario where someone has typed in 'buy motorolla v70 razr' The seller has an ad running that headlines

buy motorolla v70 razr
Next day delivery to UK
£39.99 contract free

The landing page re-enfoces the offer above, with basic information about price and delivery, and has links for :- more information, delivery detail, contract terms and conditions, about us etc bbut does NOT have all that information on the page.

Now in my mind that is the perfect landing page. It has the ability for the buyer to buy off the cuff (which is what they have asked for) yet allows the surfer to dig deeper.

here is the thing though, in the eyes of the Google algorithm, this is a poor landing page

I say again though that my initial worries were because of the fact that the spiders would be banned, and that there was no process to corect the bad calls such a young algorithm would make. A manual review of the sort of landing page I speak of and recommend is used, would result in an instant reversal IMO of any minimum bid penalty.

 

Several of you have made excellent arguments in this thread. There were quite a few points that I had not initially considered. Thanks for taking the time and effort to make this a thread worth reading.

 

The only problem though Will is that those of us who feel passionately for what we do and believe, often allow that passion to spill over into what sometimes appears as aggression. I am guilty of this I am afraid.

 

Man, I keep telling myself to get out of this discussion, but I just can't help myself. I can ignore most of what AEIOU said because it's just a basic difference of opinion, but at the end he seems to have been in a hurry, and started pulling things completely out of context - drawing unreasonable conclusions. I promise, I'm out of this after I clarify my position.

My conclusion is that until I make their bot happy, I'm beating my head against the wall.

Yeah, uh, thanks. What I was saying - and if you have been following the thread it is pretty clear - is that the manual review process is a myth. In my case no level of logical argument with the CSR's had any impact. After a week of beating my head against that wall, this was my conclusion.

So, at this point, I'm putting up a site full of content, adding some content that my users don't want to see cluttering up my landing pages, then I'm going to wait for the bot to clear me - which I'm sure, will eventually happen.

1. What I said was cluttering up the LANDING PAGE. If you truly think that every landing page should have content, then maybe you should be working for Google, but neither you nor the Google algorithm writers should be working in marketing/advertising.
2. Not every site requires content. If you are selling a well known product and that is all you are doing, content is optional and often unwanted by the end user. And yes, I GET that Google disagrees with this statement. I get it. They have beat it into my head for 10 days.

I know their bots well, I'm #1 for the vast majority of my keywords on the natural result side, so don't just assume that I'm some "15 year old" who threw up a garbage website and is being justly penalized.

Yeah, again, you assume way too much about me. My site has been #1 on those keywords for 18 months now and all I do is add content through a twice weekly blog post and some basic SEO principles. If that's chasing the tail, I'm OK with it. It makes me money. It's also how business is done on the web. Quit drinking the Google Kool-Aid and realize that the ideal does not exist. Everyone is gaming the system to some degree. The very fact that an algorithm exists means that it can be gamed. And the fact that it can be gamed means that I MUST GAME IT to stay ahead of my competitors. You have a very pollyanna view of this whole thing.

My initial goal here was simply to share my experience with other advertisers so that others might have an idea of what to expect from Google. I felt that would be helpful since Google seems to enjoy shrouding itself in secrecy. And yes, I was ticked off and needed to blow off some steam and I did that as well. So, I've shared my experience and I will carry on now. AEIOU can return to his Google Drum Beating and I can go back to my marketing job.

 

Since I have seen people see their rates go down after a manual review, I don't consider it a myth at all. The reality is the algo is not as flawed as some want to think, so when a manual review is done, most people are still being denied. I am not sure what more you want. Have you requested a manual review, or do you know that it would provide the same response? If you were as confident in the quality of your site as proclaim, then I would have thought the first thing you would have done is asked for a review. I still don't know if you have or have not done that. Nor do I know the results if you did.

Nobody said you needed to have a landing page chocked full of content. They simply said it needed to be a quality site that provided people with access to the information they might be seeking on a keyword search. You are the one who misconstrued that as stuffing your landing page. If I wanted to take potshots back, I could question how some of you manage to stay in business with the basic fundamentals even a novice real business owner would learn in the first 6 months. Sometimes I wonder if this entire model has allowed a whole group of people mature and develop in a cacoon of business ignorance.

You can have whatever you want on your site. That is up to you. You still don't get it though. If you don't have any content then you are providing a BAD experience for most of the people visiting your site. What do you think the other 95% of the people on your site thought? Simply the price was too high? The ads in google search are not delineated as ads, and that is on purpose. If they were clearly exposed as advertisments, your ability to get people on your site would dwindle to nothing. Even people who might want to buy are unlikely to jump into a hardsell.

That is rich. I have a pollyana view but you are the one who got kicked in the teeth not me. You are the one that can't wrap your head around this whole thing. This is not complicated. This is basic business stuff. There is more to business then just hardcore marketing.

First of all it is Aeiouy and I don't begrudge anyone from sharing their opinion or feelings. I am going to share mine as well though. And quite honestly a lot of the reaction smacks me as simple ignorance. I already said that it could have been handled better, but beyond that the changes are absolutely necessary. I haven't seen anyone come close to arguing anything reasonable to the contrary. Just a lot of short-term thinking and why mes... I know people got to let of steam and all that. And honestly I applaud you because you went beyond that and continued to work on fixing things. Some people have simply sat on their hands and done nothing.

Honestly, if this is the worst thing that ever happens to someone's business they should consider themselves blessed. Dealing with changes and adversity is a requisite to be succesful in the long-term. Throwing up your hands and blaming someone else every time something goes against you is never a formula to success.

Finally, I just don't get the attitude that some people, and it seems to be from people who consider themselves more marketers than anything else, that the customer is disposable. No long term thinking, no thought given to customer retention, or repeat traffic. Just churn them in until they go away. It is like people are building their own little personal pyramid schemes that are destined for collapse. For me the idea of making sure you your business is secure into the future is extremely important. The path google has undertaken is a sound one. For people to arguing against the general principle just makes zero sense to me.

 

Link me to a post where someone had a manual review done and they successfully had the decision overturned. Blog, a post here, anywhere. I'm truly interested in seeing it. I have posted my experience in this thread. I had a manual review done, spent a couple of hours talking to CSR robots, then gave up.

From Google's Adword Help Site:

"Quality Score

This is the basis for measuring the quality of your keyword and determining your minimum bid. Quality Score is determined by your keyword's clickthrough rate (CTR) on Google, relevance of your ad text, historical keyword performance on Google, the quality of your ad's landing page, and other relevancy factors."

Now this is their entire definition of Quality Score. Where in there does it say anything about site quality? It says the quality of your ad's landing page. "Nobody" said that? Have you been paying attention to this issue at all? Hello?

You just did take a potshot. Hmmmmm. If I wanted to take a potshot, I'd ask why you are spending your time writing articles and not making full use of your supposed business skills. But we don't want to take pot shots do we?

You just love to speak in generalities, don't you? You know nothing about me. Every time? Throwing up my hands? I'm working on fixing the problem. Who in the hell are you talking about here?

Yeah, I think we all get that. Please, you don't ever need to clarify this point. As far as this thread goes, it completely defines you.

 

"Quality Score

This is the basis for measuring the quality of your keyword and determining your minimum bid. Quality Score is determined by your keyword's clickthrough rate (CTR) on Google, relevance of your ad text, historical keyword performance on Google, the quality of your ad's landing page, and other relevancy factors."

Not only does it not mention landing page quality, it doesn't mention the use of Vanity URLs. I found out the hard way that, if your site is actually www.bigcompany.com, and you use for your "flying widgets" campaign an ad with the vanity URL of "www.flyingwidgets.com" your minimum bids will skyrocket. I chose to use vanity URLs, pointed at various sections of three different e'commerce catalogs appropriate to the URL and keywords, and the new algo busted me. I didn't know better because it doesn't say so anywhere in the Google help files. Only by having a manual review was I able to learn that...I told the Google reps that the documentation needed and they said

Of course, the above only applied to ONE site I was working with vanity URLs for...the other two did not suffer min. bid increases. That's really helpful, isn't it? I love Google's consistency in these matters. The policy of Google seems to be, "Keep 'em guessing. It's more fun that way. "

So, continuing my newspaper advertising policy analogy from a few pages back, which Vowel Boy/Google Rep "aeiouiy" has so far refused to comment on in spite of being invited to do so twice, the Vanity URL policy is like the newspaper saying, "Oh, we note that your business has several names (AND DOMAIN NAMES) that you run in your ads. But the sign on your store says "Joes Pet Shop." Therefore, we've decided to charge you 100 times more for your ad in our paper." WOULD NEVER HAPPEN outside the digital world. Google writes its own rules; longstanding policies against discrimination don't apply to them.

 

aeiouy/Google Rep wrote:

That is just so presumptious..."Most people." That's not true. I often shop via clicking on Adwords ads. If I know what I want, I price shop by comparing stores and prices by clicking on 5 or so Adwords ads. I also visit Froogle. I also visit Shopping.com, etc. Dude, do you even shop online yourself? It sounds like you don't.

See, it's not that you don't have some good points in your posts...it's that you make assumptions about the marketplace and about "most people" that is so offensive. You haven't a CLUE what "most people" want...who made you (or Google) the expert?

You are presuming based on your own experience. Okay, you have a blog with some adsense ads...how many e'commerce sites have you founded and run? How long have you been in e'commerce?

 

aeiouy/Google Boy wrote:

THere you go, presuming what people want and what makes them happy with no experience or evidence.

I also run a retail gift store with my wife. (Unlike you, I'm actually IN retail commerce, offline and in). 90% of the customers who come in my door do not buy anything (i.e., I have a 10% conversion rate on walk-ins, measured with a people counter on the front door). Are they "unhappy" because they didn't like my products, selection, prices? UNHAPPY? No, they just didn't find what they were looking for, or they may be back another time after comparison shopping me with other stores in my area. SO WHAT? That's how people shop.

Yes, and the idea is/was that my ad will be there then, too. And they will be able to find me and become a conversion. NORMAL consumer behavior.

By the way: I run an ad for my gift store in the local newspaper every week. The ad gets changed 2-3 times a year, but it's always the same size/style. It's always there. Someone sees the ad, comes in, sees something they like but maybe not right now. Later, they see the ad again, and it reminds them to come back and buy the thing. It's a gift store...they buy it when they want it, not when they need it.

You and your fellow Google reps presume to know shopper habits. It's obvious that you haven't read many books and studies on either online or offline consumerism. Some of us have. We should be free to use the techniques we know work for our particular situations without Google or you telling us what SHOULD work in your inexperienced little dream worlds.

 

I guess I agree with this analogy