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

Every day, more keywords are dropping from my listings so maybe it has something to do with indexing the page and matching it to the keywords in the ad. Also I have noticed that my kewords with lower CTR are not being affected just the high converting keywords

 

Well I'm not so sure.

If somebody came along wanting to advertise something worthwhile on my site then I would probably do it at a fairly good rate. If on the other hand they wanted to advertise some crappy MFA site then I would still advertise it but just charge them more to compensate for the loss of reputation of my site.

I reserve the right to charge what I like for advertising on my site and I am sure google feels the same.

Disclaimer: I don't actually ever sell links or advertising on my sites.......

 

I think it's more a case of bait and switch. Lure thousands of advertisers in at an average of $0.05 a click for years, then go "Hey guys, now you have to pay $5.00, suck on that!"

 

hmm tons of people are very unhappy / dropping google from their ppc. how long will it take the eggheads to realize we will NOT pay $5 and $10 bids for arbitratry keywords?

 

I think they realized it weeks or months ago when they decided to implement the latest round of changes. By Google's own words they say the goal is to drive away certain types of advertising. The whole point of this update is to get rid of arbitratry advertisers.

 

Just went and checked my adwords account and noticed something interesting. First, every single keyword has now been deactivated for search results, but I am starting to get clicks on those ads at my original bid price. And they are now in a much higher position???? And secondly, I am getting quite a bit of traffic off the content network for keywords that I had never gotten before. The CTR on content is much lower, but I have gotten back a part of my traffic

 

I don't think that was ever in question. The landing page quality score is part of the equation. A lower score equals a higher bid. If you bid enough you can have a horrible page. I suspect that is unlikely to change.

 

And I have to disagree. I think it is akin to advertising a brick and mortar business and having people come to your main address versus having them come to a shady alley entrance in the back. Why can't you actually advertise your site and services publically? Why would anyone want to limit the ability of people to buy things from them? The only good reason is for the sake of manipulation. The are other ways to track sources and movement besides isolating pages, so that is not a good enough answer.

Advertise you business and direct people to the front door. That is a very reasonable way for them to judge it, if they choose to do so. They guy who is guiding people in the hidden secret back entrance is up to something.

 

aeiouguy, sorry but that is absolute garbage IMO.

You have painted an analogy that could not be farther from the truth.

Who said 'shady back alley'?

PPC should be compared to a personal shopper. Now if I went to Harrods and asked a personal shopper to find me a set of cufflinks with Welsh dragons on encrusted in red rubies, and he took me the front door of the store and said 'there you go sir'. I would be well pissed off.

If OTOH he led me by the hand, and while leading me there he telephoned ahead, and when we arrived at the jewellery department the assistant had already gathered a nice selection of such cufflinks, I would be W£LL impressed.

Now in which scenario would you say I am most likely to buy?

I do not have a clue what you are saying here sorry. you ARE advertising your wears publicly.

You are NOT limiting anything. If your adsense campaign has been done correctly you will be getting HIGHLY TARGETED traffic. so why should you dump that highly targeted traffic on a home page?

Answered above with regard the personal shopper. How would you feel if you asked a shop assistant where xx product was, and they led you to the main store entrance and said, 'It's in here sir'

The key here is that the traffic is one step away from buying the product you have advertised, ALL you need to do is complete the sale. By delivering them to a totally focused page you are actually HELPING them, not misleading them.

 

I did my countries a - z all diffrent landing pages all diffrent keyword. SMS to SPAN 0.3 SMS to ZAIRE 10 $ how in the hell can Adwords Bot search so wrong the page is 100 % the same just the country is diffrent. Bogus. If they can not controll it 100 % wait untill they can.
And yes the Adsense money has dropped with 1/5 beucase no one is stupid enought to put 10 $ for ZAIRE

 

I was spending over 1000GBP/month with Google promoting a site which certainly wasn't abritrage in any way (although I did have a small Adsense box to try and get some revenue from those who weren't interested). Google now want triple my previous max CPC just to show my ads!

I've sent feedback to Google letting them know that at that price I'll be spending nothing at all with them. I got a box telling me they had a 'higher than usual amount of feedback' - I wonder why?

I've removed adsense from all sites I promote via Adwords now. I really can't believe this is going to increase revenue for G.

If they hadn't already, Google definitely jumped the shark now.

 

I wonder what Google's shareholders would think if they knew about this move. You'll never hear about this on financial news. I don't think that they understand how the money is made.

JJ

 

I would bet some hedge funds doing research will stumble upon this or already read it.

They are ruthless.

 

Howdy... I'm new around here.

Just wanted to chime in that I'm an AdSense publisher, and from looking at the ads showing up on my content sites I can safely say that these algo changes seem to be hitting the legitimate advertisers far more than the MFAs.

My main site's adblocks are now dominated with MFA ads.

Yikes Looks like I'll have to start blocking them in the competitive filter again...

 

GOOG is a 128 Billion corporation. A few million less a month is nothing to them, I'm afraid.

 

For all those chirping and complaining, the reality of Google's changes are to improve paid search results and allow for the real advertisers that are the authority sites to rise to the top. The elimination of Search Arbitragers and Affiliates is the right course of action and overall a great thing. I work for an SEM firm and will tell you, across the board this has helped every client we serve. Good for those with original content, bad for those without orignal content. This is a positive move.

 

I think 50% of the people here work in a SEM/SEO company.

 

Sorry I'm a bit late responding but I'll try and clear some things up.

There are lots of good reasons for not having your PPC landing pages in the index, the most important is for testing. For example if you're A/B testing something such as a button placement, text color, image size or any other on page factors you're going to end up with two similar pages. For campaigns that have been running for years with any A/B testing you could end up with quite a few very similar pages. To prevent dupe content penalties I'll keep them all from being spidered and put in the index.

Next if you're competing on a commodity branded item, creating a "good user experience" is not as important as competing on price/value (for example a free bonus no one else has). Sure you have to satisfy some basic trust criteria but for someone typing in "buy motorola XYZ123" they aren't looking to browse around, they want to see what your deal is, and they buy or bail based on how you compare. Giving people other options allows them to get off the "desired path".

That's my approach and you're allowed to have one that's completly different. Up until a few days ago my approach allowed me to operate profitably. Google's changed the rules and like it or not you've got to play within them or not play at all. My big beef is they won't quantify what those rules are or tell me what I'm missing or doing wrong.

 

Welcome to Digitalpoint man.

As I said somewhere else, if this keeps up, a lot of advertisers will just leave.

 

I agree with you 100%, BUT you are missing the argument here. If Google want to stop arbitrage, then they simply ammend the adsense rules to state that it is against the TOS to drive traffic to sites with adsense on, and kill it dead for everyone. OR they actually get up off their backsides and police the adsense system properly.

If arbitrage is wrong, then outlaw it. Simple as that really isn't it.

Hi Graywolf, welcome to DP, good to see you here, thanks for those words re landing pages, I was starting to drown LOL Your comment regarding the motorolla xxx was exactly what I was trying to get across. IF the keyword research has been done properly then dumping traffic on the home page is criminal. I used the hosting example as one such case.