As a newbie (2 years ago), I signed up with Adwords, created some ads and advertised my videos and products. Soon, I was overwhelmed with the notion of affiliate advertising and advertised everything on my site, including casinos and flash games. At the time, my keywords ran from $0.04 to maybe $0.10 per word. When Google got wind of my site promoting casinos, etc. my keyword costs jumped to an amazing $10.00 per word! We call this Blacklisting! Two years later, after removing the nonsense from my sight (a year ago) I now have a really nice site with great products I personally promote. I've explained to Google that I no longer have links to casinos or games or anything that would impede their family values. NuttyPrices is an avenue for people to view funny videos at work, or at home with the kids and not have to worry about foul language, etc. Yet, they will not reduce my CPC from $10/keyword for keywords that don't even produce an ad in a Google search. One of our big sellers 2 years ago was, "Fruitcake Lady". Search that in Google. How many ads do you see on the left? NuttyPrices used to be at the top, costing us only $0.04 per click. Now, Google is asking us for $10/click due to competition. What competition? Did you do the search? What competition? So, now we have new videos that we want to promote. And....guess what....Google Adwords is asking either $5 or $10 per click to advertise. Is it just me or is that insane? You want to charge ME $10.00 every time a person clicks on a link to my site from Google to view a funny video? Umm, yeah, if it included a guaranteed $1000 purchase, maybe..... Insane, I tell ya, just insane! So, they say that we need to better our configuration. That's BS! What we need to do is take them down a notch or two. Any ideas?
If you have been using AdWords for 2 years, you should know that this is a quality score issue. (more than likely). Please have a read of this: http://www.redflymarketing.com/blog...your-adwords-quality-score-a-mini-case-study/ And this: http://www.ewhisper.net/blog/google-adwords-quality-score-factors-demystified/ That should sort out the problem.
Thank you for your post, Cianuro (Cyanide)... I know about quality scoring. This is not the issue. I also know about blacklisting. This IS the issue. My posting here is not to fence mental midgets nor the minute intricacies of Google law. It is to warn newbies to not be tantalized by the ‘glowing blue light’ thinking it is their next meal ticket. Bite at the glowing light and you will be consumed. But then, you become a little wiser, too. Enter at your own risk…
WOW. It has been about 8 years since someone pointed that out! It was the name I used on IRC and dial in BBs back in the day. I forgot what it meant! I do not think it is a blacklist issue. I think it may be something like domain level quality score. (debatable). Have you tried moving domain?
Cianuro, while I applaud your heritage, your offering is unfounded. My domain is hosted by an affluent client. I am telling you, my keyword CPC went from $0.04 to $10.00 in one day. I did not change my ad or my site. I was emailed by Google notifying me of the change and asking me to increase my CPC for advertising. What did change? Do a Google search for "Fruitcake Lady". There used to be a dozen listings on the right, with NuttyPrices.com at the top. Now there is one. And it doesn't even take you to the content you seek. NuttyPrices was (and still is) the only site that offers all 26 clips of the Fruitcake Lady in one place. But I'll be D@mned if I have to pay $10/click for someone to have a good laugh.
OK, let's make this simple. What is your quality score for they keywords that have the high minimum bid? What is the destination URL? What is the ad copy?
I'm getting exactly the same situation and I've had it confirmed by my Google account manager... it IS quality score. In my case its a much more competitive term for which we had been getting positions 1-4 for around £13 per click. This was last week. Now, we're lumped with position 8 at £20 per click!!! I spent about half an hour on the phone to our Google rep and was told that it is a result of a quality score update. Basically, they decided that our landing page was rubbish based on the content. Kevver, I'm thinking that you're quality score is low because you have no ACTUAL content (I'm talking about actual text) because your content is video... Thing is, Google's "quality" score looks at page content to determine how good it thinks it is in relation to your key words. So what happens if my landing page is entirely constructed with images, or flash? Well, I'll get a poor quality score. Even if I actually get loads of conversions from that page. Google, though, will force me to increase my bid to ridiculous levels if I want to stay there. Quality Score doesn't sound right to me. Something like "Google Profit Rating" is more like it... It seems Google won't budge on how backwards their algorithm is so I'm now faced with trying to figure out how to increase my "quality" score. Ideas include, but are not limited to; Cloaking to give Google itself a keyword-stuffed page but send visitors to my application form Visit the #1 listing for all my terms and copy the site Stop spending £15k/mth with Google and give it to Yahoo/MSN/etc Whether I put those ideas into action is an entirely different matter.... Anyone know when Google's end of year is?
I believe this is a quality score issue. Everytime i encounter that kind of problem (raising a bid almost 25x the usual), i pause the campaign and create a new one with the same set of keywords. And my problem is solved.
That's a short term solution - if your advert text doesn't change, and your keyword list doesn't change, and your landing page doesn't change, then your QS will keep returning to it's bad level. Assuming that the landing page is OK, then writing a good advert is usually enough to give you an "OK" rating at least, and more often than not "GREAT". I've never had a keyword with a minimum cpc of more than £0.25, and that was only due to the keyword not being particularly relevant (I was trying to get searchers to 'turn the corner' with their search). If your QS is very poor, your campaign isn't working optimally anyway, so it makes sense to fix it...
Can you make a bit of seo ? I see top ranked website for 'fruitcake lady' are other videos website. Also, I get 346,000 results for this search term, maybe ranking higher is do-able ?
Never managed a campaign like this one, but it sounds as if every site is offering the same thing, for free? If so, then the CTR is likely to be skewed heavily towards the top few results - searchers will click on the first site that has these adverts. This being the case, you'd need to write a VERY good advert to get people clicking on your advert, but even then, you're going to struggle, I think. SEO may be your best hope...
The CTR taken into account for quality score is normalized to the position of the ad. If this was not the case, all top ads would have the higher CTR and higher QS and would not allow anyone to enter the market.
True, but I think in this case, the distribution of clicks will be a bit different to the usual, because people won't 'shop around', or visit multiple sites for information. All of the sites (I assume) have the same content, and the searcher probably knows that, so they'll (probably) click on the first advert that they see.
Well, yea of course while you're improving the quality of your landing page and ad text, you can do what i said even if it's temporary, instead of doing nothing but raising the bid to whatever Google asks you to, isn't it?
The nuttyprices site is loaded up with easily identifiable affiliate content - that will cause QS (min bid) issues almost everytime.
Exactly. Google is making it more difficult for PPC affiliate marketers. I think it is a good thing. Less competition for those who put in the effort.
You can also set your bids for position 2-10 instead of 1-10 By not bidding on the number one position you won't compete as much with a QS issue and have a better chance to optimize ad quality without breaking the bank.
you site has a history in adwords. a negative one. I would suggest buying a brand new domain and trying again. I had some of my sites google slapped, all I did was bought a new domain name, put in a better linking system (sitemap, extra pages with good content) and everything went to where it was before.
It's about affiliate content - buying a new domain and loading up the same content will get the OP right back to where they are today. Fix the current site on the current domain and the QS qill adjust accordingly.