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

Actually it isn't as simple as that. exactly defining what is MFA or arbitrage and what is not would be very difficult. Yes there are some very black and white extremes, but there is also a wide gray area where defining the difference is very hard. I don't understand what all of Google's changes were this past week, but what I do know is that my eCPM is up, my CTR is up and my page views are up. If this trend continues, my revenues will recover for July which started off really bad because of the U.S and Canadian holidays and World Cup.

 

G's 7/7 post on the blog says,

"If you do see an increase in minimum bids and you feel that your landing page is providing a great user experience, please contact AdWords support and we'll take a look."

Are you all notifying them of your situations? I sure did, but haven't heard back anything yet.

It's just such BS, because all of my ads are for e'commerce catalogs. The traffic we get are from people searching for those products. When they click the ad, they go to a page containing those products. How could it be more relevant? There is no Adsense on any of the pages. This is just standard e'commerce shopping cart product sales...no e'books, no affiliate crap.

Our ads mention the keywords. Even the Display URL mentions the keywords! The CTR's have been 5-20%! And yet the CPC was $.10 or so until this.

Of course, there has been no decrease at all in the number of Ebay, Shopping.com etc. ads. And you can't tell me those are relevant! Everyone ignores those except Newbies. So, should I assume that Ebay is now paying $5,000 per click?

By the way, a search of Google news this a.m. turned up only one story about this. Amazing the techie media hasn't caught on. I bet most advertisers haven't noticed it enough yet! Just us daily Adwords folks.

I hope this blows up.

Here's the story: http://www.e-consultancy.com/news-blog/361370/ppc-hyperinflation-reported-on-google-adwords.html

I agree that it will be nice to weed out some of the junk sites and MFA'ers, but there are so many of us who are just so legit, and we're getting squeezed, too.

How can an ecommerce wite selling products which are exactly what the shopper is searching G for be irrelevant? Makes no sense at all.

What, should I go put a paragraph on the sites about the products: "We sell widgets. A whole lot of them. As you can see below, we have one of the best selections of widgets in the industry, at competitive prices. For an article about widgets [that someone else wrote], click here."

My clients will do it if they have to, but I very much resent it...they don't sell information, they sell products. They are simply not in the product review or other information business. They don't have the staff to write reviews and provide "relevant" information.

I fail to see the difference between ads for my sites and those for Ebay. They both lead to a page selling products in a list. Only, in our case, they are products we actually selll....not that others do. Thus, we are even MORE relevant than Ebay.

 

Is that a link from google? I don't think there blog would be hosted on blog spot.

 

Really, considering they own it?

 

I have seen seen 1 $10 minimum. Try changing the keyword format and cleaning out the keywords that are not effective for you. Bid what you think it is worth, google may send it into trial.

We are close to August when most of Googleplex is on downtime, so I doubt there will be any significant changes before Sept.

 

Hello


Thank you for your email. I understand that you are concerned as you have
recently seen an increase in the minimum bids required for some of your
keywords that link to your site www.sendsmshere.com. I have reviewed your
account in detail and will address your issues below.


First of all, I can confirm that you have recently experienced a decrease
in your Quality Score due to the quality of your landing page. This is not
related to your addition of any tracking code to your website.


Secondly, please note that as part of our goal to provide our users,
advertisers, and partners with useful, quality advertising, we've defined
the Landing Page and Site Quality Guidelines to help advertisers get the
most out of their AdWords campaigns. We believe a successful ad campaign
is based on providing a positive and useful website experience for users.
Sites built with our guidelines in mind can increase the likelihood that
users will convert to customers and contribute to the ongoing success of
AdWords advertisers.

and i asked them how can i see the changes how can i fix it?

Unfortunately we cannot go into specifics about what changes you can make
to get a better Quality Score other than to make sure that you are
following the posted guidelines and that you consider the quality of
search user's experience when thinking about the advertising experience
you are providing.

That makes it so easy

 

This is where they are likely to come unstuck under EU law. Charging structures have to be transparent, and I am not sure that their guidelines are transparent enough.

I should say that this has not affected me AT ALL, not one penny, so I am not just a grumbling guy who is losing money and has a grudge.

I have also sent an email to G but have yet to have a reply.

 

Cristian, I've noticed a 25-50% increase in earnings. Perhaps this will roll off as advertisers come to term with the higher bids and adjust accordingly.

Overall, bid relativity should be the same as every advertiser is accustomed to the rules. Unless, of course, people figure out the exact ranking factors for their quality score and manipulate them like the SERPs.

 

There is nothing to adjust basic fact SMS Service to ZAIRE can not be worth 10 $ thats blackmail. Saying its 10 $ is saying we do not want you as an advertiser.
I think Google overall is stepping up to try to look more serius.

My adsense has not gone up it has gone down.

 

We have discussed this previously when i have said that this is a money making excercise, but now we have some hard proof. Take the following scenario.

site A = affected by the Quality Score (QS) and has bid increased to $5

site B = unaffected by the QS as they have a great setup and min bid = $0.20

site A allows the campaign to run @ $5.
Site B which has done NOTHING WRONG now has to pay $5.01 to have their advert show rather than the $0.21 previously.

How can this be fair? when innocent parties, companies who are playing within the quality guidelines are getting indirectly penalised?

 

Has anybody else had their CPC reduced while all this has been going on? Mine is down to 20p from 30p.

 

Hi All

I am so glad to be a member of this forum as I became really worried about why this had happened to my campaigns (jump to $5-10 per click).

I wish I had checked here first and got the definitive answer.

Thanks guys for the info.

Regards

Baz

 

That's inaccurate though because you don;t have to outbid someone to outrank their ad. Where I said earlier in this thread when I moved a site to a fresh domain, including its ads, I had to bump up the spend big time to get similar ad ranking positions.

Example (off the top of my head) - same keywords, same ad:

Established domain, established successful ad, ranking avg #3: CPC £0.15
New domain, new campaign, ranking avg #4: CPC £1.05

Lower ranking, higher bid.

Google isn't like Overture (thank god).

But you are probably right in as far as the $0.20 example of your will go up somewhat (though unlikely to $5+).

 

My keywords were not effected at all.

 

First, thanks to everyone for posting such useful information. I was in a state of panic over this until I read through this thread. At least now I can try to improve the "quality" (as defined by Google's algortithms) of my landing pages and hopefully, my business won't completely collapse. I receive 68% of my leads through Adwords and, I'm sure like many of you, have spent years fine tuning my bids, creative, etc.

But here's a question. In the old days, I totally understood Google's formula: They looked at your CPC and your CTR to determine where you were placed. If you weren't writing good relevant creative, your CTR suffered (when compared to others bidding the same CPC) and you were moved down. They have an opportunity cost with impressions, so financially, they want to make sure that you are getting clicked. Great! Get it.

Now, I also understand that they want good landing pages. I get it. Totally. But here's the problem I have. So, say I have a crappy landing page, but if I bid $1 or $5 or $10 depending on what their goofy algorithm says, then it's cool for me to be listed on google. Smacks of bribery IMHO. "I don't like your site, but pay me enough and I'll turn the other cheek."

Finally, the biggest issue is this. Their algorithm cannot possibly determine what is a good landing page. Not enough AI in the world to make that determination. There should be an easy way for their good customers to appeal this and have this decision overriden by a human. They claim that it's possible, but I've yet to hear of anyone having success.

I hope this bites them in the arse. I think Google is getting just a wee bit cocky in their adolescence.

 

If Google makes or breaks your business, you have other things to worry about IMO. Time to get some of those egss in the other basket, so to speak.

Welcome to the forum!

 

very good post, and the ONLY thing that can define the quality of a landing page is conversions END OF!

 

Hope this doesn't get lost within this growing thread

So, I too am affected and it's put a large hole in the ship, I'm afraid of eventually sinking. I actually sell product though (it's primary focus is NOT AdSense) and asked my account manager if they could take my conversion ratio, which is being tracked by adwords, into consideration.

No Dice.

I do have an adsense block on my landing page, if I take it off, anyone think Google will show me some better love?

 

lol all you guys are complaining, but maybe you should RETHINK who YOU are. a lot of you just make money off of users who are looking for real information and get sent around in cirlces off of MFA sites. most of you aren' providing real services, just sites tailored with stolen info to tailor to adsense profits. i mean, cmon, google doesn't want this. if you're being affected, it means you're doing this. granted there are some erroneous exceptions, and those people can email adwords support. the average user doesn't want this. so don't complain. just silently switch over to msn or yahoo