I just noticed that most of my keywords were disabled unless I pay the minimum requirement that they ask for. I think I am the only one who thinks this way, but I feel that unless you are spending at least $100 per month on adwords, you are just paying for empty clicks. I have been testing this for a couple of years and I can go on a forum that allows advertising, post a link and have 30 people subscribed to my services within a few hours. However I can pay $50 dollars worth of clicks for google Adwords and only receive about 10 people to subscribe. I then even asked Google Support why this is and they even chose the keywords for me to make sure that I get the best click rate, and still I pay for a ton of clicks (500 per day) and do not really see the benefits. I am spending more money on Google Adwords then the amount of money it is supposed to generate, and now with this new feature that they added for minimum cost per keyword just makes it worse. A lot of my sites offer free services so I have enough bills already, and now one of the only successful means of promoting your services has now rasised it's prices. Your opinions?
If the ROI is not in the positive for you, I definitely would stop using AdWords. If you spend more than you are gaining from it, it's not worth it.
Yeah but the only other choice is overture and before I spend $300 (or whatever the price is) for that I want to make sure that I am not just throwing money away.
Yeah, last week I spent many hours trying to sort out a roughly 60% revenue decrease on the adsense side from the new algo, and now this on the adwords side (multiple sites). About 50% of my words/phrases require a 100% increase to activate them and I’m having a hard time just saying “OK, here ya goâ€. They have been teasing these new minimums for awhile and part of me thought it might go down this way. I know some will benefit from changes on both sides, so it’s really up to me to make this work or not. But frankly, it’s just too much a moving target recently. I need some sleep. So for awhile yesterday it was the new Adwords interface with inactive keywords/phrases marked, but it wasn’t really a true reflection of what was happening with the account and they were still active and working, but you could (or could not?) control them through this new interface? But it's always all good in the background and you'll know tomorrow how today really turned out. That’s worn thin with me. It's a schloky way to rollout changes even in a low budget, low traffic, space -- of which this is neither. Fortunately, I’m in a situation where I can completely turn Adwords off and get along just fine. Adsense too, for that matter. I can’t help but think there are some folks out there who are completely freaking out, after these most recent couple weeks. Fool me twice (in the same month) … stupid me. Whether I agree with all these changes or not, or whether I think they are designed to provide a better search experience -- or bolster bottom line numbers that were not a priority item in the original (I mean original when it was all about search) design – it flat doesn’t matter. This is a new mentality. No sense blaming anyone – it’s not that unusual in business – it’s a mandated change. Some will take the time to sort it all out and make it work for them -- others won’t. But it -will- work great for many. Gotta keep that in mind. Bottom line for me; I get the message loud and clear now. It’s MY problem. Big things have changed and I have too many eggs in this one basket. I need to review and exercise some options and fortunately there are a few on the horizon. Seems like real bad timing for rattling publishers cages -- but someone, some new commitee, or some new motivating force, doesn't think it matters. I'll land on my feet. Don't give up. Good luck everyone.
Just want to add my voice and say that i am really disheartened by this new policy. For one of my keywords the minimum is $.3 and i am not even seeing ads on google for that keyword! How can the minimum be so high if no-one is bdding the minimum!!!!
If you are offering free services or have low revenue per visitor, Adwords isn't always the best choice. For topics that have decent revenue, Adwords can't be beat. I have a number of varied topics in my sites and have seen huge improvements in both Adwords value and Adsense revenue in the last week. One thing to consider is that they may have a $0.30 minimum but you will pay something lower based on Google's bid management features that protect you. I bid $0.10 on many keywords that I use to bid $0.05 but my cost still comes in at $0.05 or $0.06. For some of the low revenue sites I have, I focus my CPC purchases on second tier providers like 7search.com. They can provide a decent amount of traffic for $0.01 per click which works fine for sites like ringtones, IM related, and humor sites. For business and technical I focus almost 100% on Adwords.