If you’ve been following WMW (see Sudden increase of CPC recently?), the Blogosphere ( see Technorati Search: adwords cpc increase), or even my blog(see Google Adwords Broken or Price Gouging ) you may have seen some some people complaining about increases in min CPC prices for AdWords campaigns. Basic recap of my situation if I bid $5.00 my ads show in the top spot and in some cases even displacing three premium listings, if I bid $4.99 my ads stop showing. If I want to play I have to be willing to play top dollar and be number one, I can’t bid for a lower spot. This happens for brand new advertisements with no history. Because I’m a tinkerer and I like to understand how things work, and because I can be a bit of a nudge and pest I really wanted to figure things out, so I decided to dig a little deeper, and get someone from AdWords to look and I’d also do some recon at Pubcon
Now to provide a little more information if the keyword converts I get a $15 payout so at $5 a click I’m going to need a 33% conversion rate just to break even. While I’m not going to say that’s impossible I will say it ain’t easy, and is pretty difficult. To be successful I really needed to pay a lower CPC for a lower position, I emailed AdWords asking how to reach that goal. After a few emails back and forth here is the response I got:
I’ve reviewed the account in question and specifically the keywords within
theAd Group. The terms in this Ad Group are highly
competitive and will require higher CPCs, particularly when newly created.
I would suggest that you consider expanding the keyword list for this Ad
Group as well as including some additional keyword variations.
Alternatively, you can re-activate the keywords with the higher CPCs. If
these keywords perform well over time, it is likely that their required
CPCs may fall. Below I’ve included some general information regarding
inactive keywords and a link to our Help Center topic regarding optimizing
your keyword list.Our automatic performance monitor evaluates each keyword within your
account when submitted and periodically throughout each day. When a
keyword doesn’t have a high enough Quality Score and maximum
cost-per-click (CPC) to show ads, that keyword may become inactive for
search. If you re-use that inactive keyword, or re-enter it in another
keyword matching format, you may notice that it is inactive for search
again. This is because our system recognizes that this word has not
performed well for you in the past and so is more rigorous in its
evaluation of the word.
Now I wouldn’t say that was especially clear and didn’t really answer my question as to how a I bid a lower price for a lower position. So I decided to try my luck at Pubcon. I went to the Google booth and spoke with one of the reps. Sorry I don’t remember her name but she was helpful and tried to explain things to me, and this is what I got translated into non corporate mumbo jumbo.
- When you start a new ad the average quality score used for all of the current advertisers becomes your quality score. Once your ad is running your quality score gets re-adjusted periodically (I think every few days but not positive on the time frame).
- Once you have a higher quality score your minimum CPC will lower, and allow you to bid into lower positions.
- If you pause or delete campaigns and then try to create another ad with the same keywords your quality score for those keywords will carry over to the new campaign.
So for really competitive keyword phrases you may end up paying more (in some cases a lot more) than you want for a few days in order get a good quality score and be able to lower your bid. While I get what they are trying to accomplish I really think there are quite a few problems with this approach. First off I’ve got to be wiling to overpay and lose a considerable amount of money just to be a player. Secondly using the quality score of other advertisers as my baseline seems a little unfair. Next if I write a bad ad and I want to start from scratch with a new ad using my history for quality score means I’m starting out in the hole. Now if any of Googlers happen across this post and I’ve got something wrong please let me know and I’ll correct it. However if you’ve been negatively affected by this please contact Google AdWords and let them know. Despite the fact that they are a big corporate environment, I actually believe many of them are open to new ideas and responsive to feedback. I spoke with a few people from Google at Pubcon and that they were all pretty interested in hearing what I said as long as I was constructive in the way I said it.
Related posts:
- Using Google Checkout Buttons Doesn’t Increase Adwords CTR If you do
- Google Adwords Crossing The Streams So I was l
- Are You in Violation of Google’s Double Serving Policy? You Just Might Be! The follow
{ 1 trackback }
{ 12 comments }
Thats interesting I ran into a similiar issue with a word no one was bidding on at all. They wanted a dollar for a word that was worth 60 cents a conversion and there was no cmpetition. 24 hours later they said that I could bid 5 cents.
weirdness imo.
It sounds to me as though this is the situation you get when you have a bunch of geeks trying to run a business.
Who in their right mind is going to “be willing to overpay and lose a considerable amount of money just to be a player”?
Forgive me if I’m overlooking something, but I’ve had instances like this when I would “peel” off (delete) an unaffordable word and save the Adgroup it belonged to. Then I’d create a new Adgroup, careful to include the word in question in the headline or other line of the ads of the new Adgroup. The cost of the word changed for the better. Please don’t flame me even if I deserve it, but aren’t I right?
-Thanks
Dave I’m with you I used to do that too, but from the way it was explained to me you can’t “start fresh” with the same keyword(s), you carry around te history/performance. As I understand it this is fairly new “improvement”
On this subject something else, weird, I noticed – I recently stopped a few campaigns that I didnt really need at the moment – especially as our organic results from Google were good – we hit the first page on several of our keywords.
Lo and behold – the moment I stop the campaign, our organics drop off as well, all first-page hits gone. Is this an intentional stick and carrot approach by Google?
I’d like to hear your take on this.
Thanks
Stefan
Well that should be pretty easy to test turn it on and off every 2-3 days and see what happens. I suspect it was a coincidence, that would really be a bad idea to implement and a nightmare if you could prove it.
Hmmm….well, I guess I’ll try that one then. Lets see what happens. I’ll keep you updated.
I have seen a big problem in the last week with Google and Adwords pricing. I have a client whose business is dependent on Adwords for its business and ALL of her keywords were made inactive overnight and there was as much as a 5000% increase in the cost for getting these re-activated.
Google claim their quality ranking has changed to try and eliminate non-appropriate adverts and this caused the change. However, her web site does have at least reasonable relevancy.
We have just rebuilt new landing pages for every Ad group and major keyword so that there is very high relevancy. However, this has made no difference whatsoever. Google are on the case and have referred this to a team internally we think deals with these exceptions. However, we are still waiting for a response.
The worst thing is that her competitors are still being displayed and their prices have not changed, but their sites are less relevant if you use a typical SEO page rank analyser.
I noticed earlier that if I set up a new adwords account, the cost for the keywords in questions is one fifth of what my client is paying.
From her point of view this will put her out of business even though she has been using the same site and adverts since Adwords started. Hopefully Google will see sense and sort this out, but at the minute something very unethical seems to being going on!
I just get all my keywords going from 0,05$ to 4$, after two days of campaign, 2000 impression and 2 clicks.
Does I pay per click or to participate.
The keywords I choosed got between 150 and 300 impressions per day. I think somebody at google said that guy has to pay more to be listed so good. (between position 1 and 4).
I went in all adwords marketings texts and help but the only important thing they want is to make me trying to pay 4$ for one click. I would pay 25$ for a new quote enquiry I get per email but not 4$ for a click on a webpage.
im losing alot of money with adwords.ive tried various ways to tweak the system but nothing really works.i was told by a googler to make multiple ad groups in one campaign and alot less key words.this method stil pending.I took the rich content website approach with thousands of pages.That isnt working yet in fact most of the competitive key words are asking for 5.00 cpc rates.Ive only been playing for 3 weeks i have grossed sales somewhere around $700.00 but it has cost me 1500.00 in advertising.Hence the other theory take a beating because your new and it will change for you lol.all these methods at an early stage do nothing.its really sad when you first start your campaign the spiders dont crawl it right away and your paying 50 cents or less for top positions also producing sales.Then wham!!! google spider appears and jacks up all your prices and your ad group is dead.It lets you taste what the major players are making at the top and is @#$%$% me off.im tired of hitting road block after road block.for three weeks ive invested at least 200 hours in study and research.and im yet to find the cure.but im not a quiter i dream of the day i find the answer.then like the other guys who are doing well you will ever here from me again,
warlord74
This is getting crazy. To join the competition you have to be prepared to pay what the highest bidder is paying. But doesn’t that just protect the highests bidder from honest competition? Anyone entering the market – regardless of whether their product or service is more relevant than the existing sites can’t get onto the scoreboard!
IMO the new changes in CPC costs keep the big boys at number one and just stop the rest of us making any money using CPC. Our CTR to Conversion rate can never meet the inflated costs and contstant monitoring that CPC campaigns now need.
Im new to google adsense.ok how does google paid for the google adsense program.is that based on per vistor for my site or else just by clicking the ads then i earn izit.i have an counter in my pages.its show around 200-500 per vistor a day but i never earn anything for a day.can anyone make me undestand the situation
Comments on this entry are closed.