So what do I get for having a 100% CTR for a keyword? It becomes inactive! Nice! (Click was a day ago, so the stats are up to date!) The max bid was $0.06 when the click was generated.
Hey, you are lucky! I got several keywords disabled for one campaign, and if I want to get them up again I need to bid 5 bucks per keyword!!
Are they cracking down on incorrectly spelt adwrods (yes it's a typo, but it's nicely ironic)? I always thought Walmart was one word.
Walmart.com shows Wal-Mart and I bid the terms both with the hyphen and with a space for each keyword, though not WalMart. (Well, my brain is messed up so I didn't even think of that name version!!) Would having the keyword in the title/description lower the required bid, for the 'increase quality' option? (Discalimer: I just started trying AdSense again a few days ago. Last time I tried it they didn't have this crummy 'Quality Control' stuff. So yah, I'm a MAJOR n00bie in this stuff. Well, I got to be a n00bie some where!!!)
"Increase quality" = "Pay us more" The notion that this is about "quality" is ridiculous. Do they think users aren't clicking on an ad because you're only paying 6 cents for it?
Yeah, I have a lot of ads too that have a super high percentage of view/click but are still being labeled "inactive". I thought that Google might pay me more on the AdSense side, but it still seems to remain the same.
I do see a lot of disabled keywords in my Adwords accounts but I do see a lot that are costing me less than 0.05. Often I raise my bid to there minimum but my cost doesn't go up. I raise to 0.10 but I am still paying 0.06. Overall I am still seeing about the same return on expenditure.
I have some keywords that want $1 per bid. Although there are no advertisers. So I bid $1, the cost per click is a penny or so, but it's scary having it sit there at $1 and I want to keep monitoring it constantly.
Mikejmu - if overture weren't so hard to deal with, and totally problematic (IMO, at least) in setting up campaigns and keep your account inactive (you pay daily if your account gets no clicks - I hope you know that, as I've recently lost some money by keeping my account inactive without even knowing this rule of theirs for a few months). Regarding "increasing quality" - It's just a different way of saying, either pay up more, or get your CTR shooting upwards for the entire adgroup. I know the latter isn't just hype - as I've personally had campaigns that had many keywords inactive, with minimum bids to activate going as high as $5 per click. As soon as the keywords that were approved and already ran, got a good enough CTR with one of my ads (2.5% or so), I started seeing a decrease in inactive keywords. The next day or two, there were barely any inactive ones left, with the minimum bid for the highest one to activate dropping down to $1, instead of $5. Adi Friedman TwoBelievers.com Web Holdings.
i am also very sceptical of these new changes - which have killed one of my sites. The minimum "active" bid seems to stat off high, then drop and then pick up again fairly drastically (doubles, tripples, and so on).
If it feels like a scam to you, and many other people feel it is a scam, then a scam it is. As pointed out here and elsewhere - the cost of the ads is going up and yet the adsense revenue stays the same or goes down - multiply that by millions of users and I see some record earnings in Google's future. Perhaps it would be better business just to buy shares in G? Anyway, I am getting tired of the PPC model and am looking at alternative ways to spend my marketing dollars. The depressing thing is, if I feel like that then so must many others - I can see my adsense earnings slipping as I type
It really sucks. I have a campaing with 102 keywords and a MAX CPC of $2.00 Then 36 of my keywords (the best performing ones) became inactive and G asked for to increase the minimun to $6. This is no fair game. G is acting like a dictator by doing this. They will definetlly push more people to YSM or even to the upcoming MSN AC.
This is killing me too. I don't have a ton of cash to spend on this stuff. I used to be able to budget $500 a month, set the CPC to $.05 and get the 10,000 clicks. Now I can't do that any more. It's been over a week since I started this latest campaign and I've got over $1.00 on some of my keywords and not a single click! Not only that, but only 119 impressions! I need to go somewhere where I'll get the targeted clicks I'm trying to pay for.
I was wondering the same thing. I can't afford the bids they are suggesting, so some of my keywords are sitting "inactive". I hope that it is just a wrinkle in their system that needs ironed out, but I have a feeling they have a nice little scam going on. Especially when you see that Wal mart Adword that was made "inactive". That makes no sense. I guess we'll have to see what happens.
it's actually been pretty good for me. I hated how it was before, it just didn't make any sense...now at least it's either active or inactive..