Zyn
02-01-2008, 06:01 PM
I have a Google AdWords account (not AdSense, but AdWords where I pay on a Pay Per Click basis).
It's been running for several months pretty smoothly.
Suddenly, in about November 2007, I started noticing a massive jump in PPC minimum bid requirements that Google was quoting.
As an example, for an ad that was costing around $0.30 PPC, I suddenly was quoted that my minimum bid had to be $10.00 PPC (yes, from 30 cents to 10 dollars per click!).
Even more strange, I have upped my bid to over $1 (not $10) for a short time and found I got my ad run sporadically at that price (even though minimum bid is much higher) and my average page position is around #1 or #2.
I don't even want to be that high, necessarily.
My landing pages, URL's, keywords, and ads have not changed at all.
What's going on?
I can think of a few things:
(1) Click fraud,
(2) Google may have changed something in the past few months that causes my ads to be run on other people's AdSense pages where the CTR is much lower than someone typing in the keywords in the actual search engine (just a guess),
(3) Somehow, the Quality Score of the pages may have dropped -- but even then, why the massive increase in minimum bid? The QS has, in fact, dropped to "poor" in some cases, but then a week later it will say "good" with absolutely no changes to anything.
(4) Maybe Google had not spidered the landing pages in question previously but now they have and that is negatively affecting the overall ranking (it is keyword optimized fairly well, but maybe this is a problem?),
(5) Competition -- I know there is more competition for the keywords, but then why would I rank extremely high when I up the bid. It seems all or nothing. I've had one where the minimum bid was $0.50. I bid $0.52 and got an average #2 position. Shouldn't I be able to bid less and show up at #6 or something?
I did start to notice all this when my account was about 6-7 months old, too, and that makes me wonder if this is an issue or if Google "revalues" accounts after a certain time.
Also: Contrary to most advice, I do NOT use niche keywords because there just are not enough searches to justify what I'm doing. I'd rather use more general keywords to get much more page impression, even though my CTR is low. For example, I have a niche keyword with about a 4%+ CTR, but it only gets a few clicks per month, whereas another general keyword gets only 0.60% CTR, yet it can generate hundreds of clicks per month. All of this has been the case since I started the account, so I know I've had lower bids and better results than now even with general keywords.
One final note: I recently did a test and got definite results. I have an ad campaign/ad group/keywords/landing page combo that had been working at $0.40 PPC, but suddenly stopped completely and Google was quoting $10.00 PPC. After about 3 months of no changes, I added a new ad group/landing page where it was an exact carbon copy of everything I had in the original, including the landing page being exactly the same BUT with a .info instead of a .com domain name (otherwise the same). I ran that an immediately started getting clicks again, this time with a quote of $1.07. However, I got MUCH lower conversion rates on my actual landing page. This is why I wonder if Google is running my ads somewhere other than their search engine where it is getting clicks, but not from the right people.
Can anyone offer any ideas as to what is happening and how to solve the problem?
Thanks.
~ Zyn
It's been running for several months pretty smoothly.
Suddenly, in about November 2007, I started noticing a massive jump in PPC minimum bid requirements that Google was quoting.
As an example, for an ad that was costing around $0.30 PPC, I suddenly was quoted that my minimum bid had to be $10.00 PPC (yes, from 30 cents to 10 dollars per click!).
Even more strange, I have upped my bid to over $1 (not $10) for a short time and found I got my ad run sporadically at that price (even though minimum bid is much higher) and my average page position is around #1 or #2.
I don't even want to be that high, necessarily.
My landing pages, URL's, keywords, and ads have not changed at all.
What's going on?
I can think of a few things:
(1) Click fraud,
(2) Google may have changed something in the past few months that causes my ads to be run on other people's AdSense pages where the CTR is much lower than someone typing in the keywords in the actual search engine (just a guess),
(3) Somehow, the Quality Score of the pages may have dropped -- but even then, why the massive increase in minimum bid? The QS has, in fact, dropped to "poor" in some cases, but then a week later it will say "good" with absolutely no changes to anything.
(4) Maybe Google had not spidered the landing pages in question previously but now they have and that is negatively affecting the overall ranking (it is keyword optimized fairly well, but maybe this is a problem?),
(5) Competition -- I know there is more competition for the keywords, but then why would I rank extremely high when I up the bid. It seems all or nothing. I've had one where the minimum bid was $0.50. I bid $0.52 and got an average #2 position. Shouldn't I be able to bid less and show up at #6 or something?
I did start to notice all this when my account was about 6-7 months old, too, and that makes me wonder if this is an issue or if Google "revalues" accounts after a certain time.
Also: Contrary to most advice, I do NOT use niche keywords because there just are not enough searches to justify what I'm doing. I'd rather use more general keywords to get much more page impression, even though my CTR is low. For example, I have a niche keyword with about a 4%+ CTR, but it only gets a few clicks per month, whereas another general keyword gets only 0.60% CTR, yet it can generate hundreds of clicks per month. All of this has been the case since I started the account, so I know I've had lower bids and better results than now even with general keywords.
One final note: I recently did a test and got definite results. I have an ad campaign/ad group/keywords/landing page combo that had been working at $0.40 PPC, but suddenly stopped completely and Google was quoting $10.00 PPC. After about 3 months of no changes, I added a new ad group/landing page where it was an exact carbon copy of everything I had in the original, including the landing page being exactly the same BUT with a .info instead of a .com domain name (otherwise the same). I ran that an immediately started getting clicks again, this time with a quote of $1.07. However, I got MUCH lower conversion rates on my actual landing page. This is why I wonder if Google is running my ads somewhere other than their search engine where it is getting clicks, but not from the right people.
Can anyone offer any ideas as to what is happening and how to solve the problem?
Thanks.
~ Zyn