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

Sweet, I had a batch of keywords go from $0.08 to $5.00. They can go F themselves, lost revenue from them. That was with an avg position of 1.8 and ~5% CTR.

GOOG can crash and burn.

 

Well, the new Google approach is really stupid. Please tell me why most (90%) of the keywords I use in my AdWords campaigns went up to 5-10 dollars to activate though I DO NOT USE ADSENSE on my landing pages?

 

There is much discussion going on over the new landing page quality alogrithm that Google has implemented this week. As many of you know, using adsense for content on your websites is the easiest way to earn an income. So there are now millions of sites placing ads all over there pages, becasue affiliate links convert at a much lower rate. I look at adsense as my main income maker and anything I get from an affiliate link as gravy.




Even many highly respected websites are now covered with them.

So the question we must ask is why? And the answer is, that they pay. I have a few small travel sites so I will use this as an example.

Tripadvisor.com has many of the top organic positions on the web for 1000's of travel related searches, but if you look to the right of the organic listings at the paid listings, you will almost always see an ad for their site as well. When you are directed to Tripadvisor's page it is covered with paying ads. They supply virtually no original content at all. They consider a travel guide a few lines of text about an area and then forward you to another page that has a bunch of ads on it.

They are obviously using adsense arbitrage to to earn a profit, and are offering very little to the consumer in the way of fresh content. If you drill down through their pages, you may eventually come to a link to an area's chamber of commerce site that you can click on, but there is not a bunch of originality going on.

So why would this site not be considered a Made For Adsense site? And if they are, do you think Google is going to increase their minimum click bid to $10 per keyword? I doubt it.

So the question is, just how much quality content does a site need to not get penalized by Google for having low landing page quality? I would bet that the bigger you are and the more you contibute to Google's bottom line the safer you are.

Some really competitive travel terms have seen paid ads drop by two thirds. And guess who those one third that are left are? Expedia, Orbitz, Priceline, Hotwire, Tripadvisor..etc

Almost all of those sites are selling travel, not supplying rich content. So why are so many small sites that have better content being bid out of Adwords? That question is yet to be answered.

Do you know of any other large sites that could be considered MFA sites and are going to get a pass from Google on their landing page quality?

And if you are one of the sites that has been punished for low page quality, what are you going to do to fix the problem?

Are there people out there now working on a way to optimize their sites for this new reality and if so are you having any success yet getting re-listed?

 

It hurt me another way. All the advertisers for my site are gone. My average earning per click as $.22, now it is $0.09. I had to stop my Adwords campaigns for the site because it finally cost more to PPC than the Adsense/Affiliate revenues. No, it is not an MFA site, it has real data with real targeted results.

Two of my other sites with Adense on them are getting mucher $ per click, but their traffic is small and I do not really promote them too much.

 

As I understand it, it isn't just MFA sites, or sites that are showing AdSense ads. It's to prevent campaigns from targeting keywords that aren't truly relevant to the content of the page surfers are sent to.

Here's an example, a Hosting Company offers shared hosting services. In the past it's been fairly easy for this company to bid on non or only semi-related keywords like "servers". This drives up their clicks but if you've spent much time on PPC you know it isn't really good for your ROI in the long term.

Since this ultimately leads to a lessor quality experience for the surfer who's looking for a dedicated server solution and ends up on a page only offering shared hosting services, which also lowers the overall value of the AdWords program as surfers begin to view the ad spots as crap; it's smart for Google to work at stopping this kind of blanket keyword bidding and penalize those who do it.

For legit advertisers, running more focused and narrowly targeted campaigns will lead to a higher ROI, so even if it's a little more work it's beneficial.

 

I think, in the long run, it'll lower bid prices for everyone. Cuz right now, everyone bids on single word terms "TVs" when they should focus on more focused keywords. It'll lower the bid for the other keywords since the TV keyword that is bid up to $15 or $20 raises all the other keyword bids too.

Ain't no one - besides google - making money on words that cost $2 for top placement when the profit on sale is $8 or $9. Google really needs to do something about this. Google should really take a hit at mediaplex and some of those huge companies that buy billions of keywords at once - that usually lead to dead pages (or ended auction) pages on ebay, or a similar site.

 

I hate those who just go for the single word and then throw a 6 figure monthly budget at it with way too high CPC. They kill it for the rest so I hope you're right.

 

Me too. I avoid adwords mainly because the bids are nonsensical. Last year...I sold a $19 product. Top placement cost $9 (!!!!). Just because the item contained to more generic words that people probablyt type in all the time. Made more sense to put adsense on the page than actually sell the product.

 

Well, I wouldn't look for single generic words to ever become low cost. That's probably beyond where Google would be willing to go. But I do think long term it'll make getting some secondary words and phrases more affordable for the masses, and if they're focusing their campaigns and landing pages better it'll drive up conversion rates.

Then again, I live on the silver lining

 

All Google has to do is apply auto brackets to single words...

For example, lazy advertiser with too large a budget enters:

TV

Ads shows for "Phillips TV" causing those who only advertise for "Phillips TV" having to pay more...

Now Google applies [] to TV so it's not triggered by "Phillips TV" anymore.

Just replicate the exact phrase matching.

 

these $10 bids are horrible and my landing page is totally relevant to the keyword ... it could NOT be more relevant

 

I think it's tied in with natural listings. Get more links etc. Same with Froogle.

 

I have been a "victim" of this already. I woke up today and I see that most of my keywords (KWs) have been set to "inactive" and now they want 15 times higher bid just to activate most of my KWs - yes, 15x higher!

here are some details, please let me know what you think:

my site: http://iloancalculator.com
my laning pages that now need 15x higher bids:
http://iloancalculator.com/calculator_category/mortgage_calculators.html
http://iloancalculator.com/calculators/mortgage_qualifier_caclulator.html
and many more.

this site is 100% unique, both the content and the calculators (all hand made), and in my opinion one of the best sites of its kind. it certainly is not MFA and no spam either.

when I look at the current resutls, I see 80% garbage, yet my site gets penalized by Google. I dont get it.

please, let me know what you think about this -or- if Im not getting all this correctly.

thank you, ssl

 

Man, that is bad! Your site is really professional and you do not even push adsense. You truly are a victim here.

 

Bloody Hell, Google went totally crazy.. the PR5 site is hit with the "landing page" quality algo

So, if your site is now considered MFA how can it have PR5?

 

I hope Google pays for this. BTW I tried reworking the landing page - no luck - the Min Bid. is staying solid at $10. WTF are they thinking? I s* gold bricks?

 

Some of our accounts have been badly affected by this. We have seen an increase of up to £5 on Min bids for some keywords.

The funny thing is that this will finally get rid of annoying PPC affiliates who have been 'stealing' our conversions.

 

I just received a response from G - guess what? canned response on how the minimum bid tends to fluctuate over time - denying that this has to do with this new algo. they suggested that I should improve me quality score....

hmm.. let me see:
http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=mortgage+calculator&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8
searching for "mortgage calculator" on G I get these sponsored results:

this one is at #3 - nothing but ads! is this quality?
http://pages.us.com/adsection.php?l...Y3VsYXRvcg==&gclid=CJzap8_HioYCFR6UIgode1OXJw

#8: is this quality? again, nothing but ads:
http://www.mortgagecalculatordirect...sessionid=51nrvtmlpnfboa55dvonvd45&cc=us&ns=1

in fact most of these sponsored results dont even have "mortgage calculators" on them - and honestly, I dont see these sites bidding $5 as min bid - this is what Im asked to bid (from $0.30)

there is little one can do - try to build the best site of its kinds (IMO), and get canned by "high quality" landing pages that are noting but ads.

should I just put ads on my landing pages? seems to work for the others....

tell me my reasoning is wrong - or - is this just pure evil ?

 

As this new change has only been active for a few days, I think people should hold their breath and see what happens over the next couple of weeks. If the required rates are too high to be cost effective, I'd suggest stopping campaigns for a brief period or only running campaigns on content sites until things stabilize out. Only after the initial shake out has taken place should people start to make heavy changes.

Trying to jump and respond to these changes immediatly will only waste time and money. Yes it will suck for some people, but taking a wait and see aproach is probably the wisest course of action.

 

I totally agree with you KLB. Meanwhile, I am going to switch to Yahoo and MSN for PPC advertising.

It will be very interesting to see how long Google is going to cope with the lost revenues as I am sure there will not be too many of those who will be bidding 5 to 10 dollars per click