Is there a Google Adwords Slap going on? March 5, 2008

March 15, 2008

There is another Google Slap going on In Google Adwords, after their recently Quality Score update about Landing Page Load Time Affects Quality Score. The truth is that the article that I posted, was in a queue for 10 days with Wordpress Timestamp fuction, and then this Google adwords slap has been affecting all advertisers in Google adwords. Here are some Adwords advertisers testimonials:

its been a while, I was wondering if people notice a google slap today…march 5,2008?

I have several keywords that has really high ctr becoming inactive. 16.39%, 31.51% and 32.88% ctr examples below.

Keyword Status Help Quality Score Help Current Bid Max CPC Clicks Impr. CTR Avg. CPC Cost Avg. Pos
keyword Inactive for search Increase quality or bid $0.50 to activate Poor Minimum bid: $0.50 $0.45 79 482 16.39% $0.28 $21.98 2.7
keywordb Inactive for search Increase quality or bid $0.50 to activate Poor Minimum bid: $0.50 $0.45 836 2,653 31.51% $0.18 $148.10 2.1
keywordc Inactive for search Increase quality or bid $0.50 to activate Poor Minimum bid: $0.50 $0.45 4,124 12,541 32.88% $0.30 $1,250.81 2.1

What amuses me is this: I haven’t touched my account, or website attached to this account for over a year. How is it then that Google all of a sudden deems my quality score to be lower? And don’t give me any bs about how they are improving their algo and that’s why…No, they are trying to milk out more money per click is what…especially after that Comscore erroneous article put their stock in a tailspin a couple weeks ago…

Yes, it also happened to us. BIG TIME. We run very low bids on some very low-competition keywords. Usually, we are the only result, or one of 2 or 3 results. Yesterday, all our quality scores changed to POOR, and all our min CPCs went up to $10.

I have suffered this too with some of my client account which is a friend, I usually don’t make any service like this but I sometimes get to manage some google adwords accounts. And this is what another user said:

I think that’s what google wants everyone to react too… increase the bids… my guess is they will normalized it again after a few days… then again its a guess…

I suggest don’t do anything and see what happens…

That is what I really recommends to anyone, because tested anything regarding Quality Score factors, and even added a better/unique content and nothing happened. What I really think the reason was is because his site was down for 24 hours and I stopped their campaign and then resumed it, it was perfect with great quality score but since March 5, 2008 it was OK and few minutes letter Poor. The campaign still active but I did not bid higher (and by the way, still receiving impressions and Clicks LOL). And after few days one of the keywords are getting back to “great”. So be patient…

I got hit big time, shut down my whole account, almost every keyword was changed to poor and $12 to activate.

Just buy a new domain and start again. I’ve been up and running since yesterday, and in comparison, my bids for keyword are an average of 5-10 cents higher than they were before the slap to get the same number of clicks.

Doing this slap is just a way to raise bid prices without actually saying it.

Yes, You can buy a domain name, but thinking as a “Long term” you will be slapped again. But in case you want to follow this strategy buy some cheap domains with their coupons with the following top registrar: Godaddy, Dotster and Network Solution.

Ouch, that hurts. Now, I’ve been slapped. One of my sites. All you people I doubted when I rode by on my high horse and said you should fix your quality issues, enjoy this news… apparently, I’m a low quality schmuck like you now. If I were you, I’d kick a little sand in my face, go ahead, I deserve it, no biggie.

Saw my first $10 min bid today, in one of my accounts. And I just finished looking through the whole account, it’s been slapped hard.

If you’re out there, thinking like I was, that your quality was fine and you’d never get hit, give some thought to my news today. One example… a page / keyword / ad combo that converts daily at over 35% for me, got labeled as highly irrelevant…

I still don’t think this is being done to raise prices, booting me from the auction doesn’t acheive that. I think it’s an over zealous approach to quality where they’ve gone overboard or misunderstood some key points. Stay time is an example - if you give someone exactly what they want, a 5 second visit might be vastly better than a 30 second visit - but somebody might have decided 5 seconds was a bounce and that my site sucks because nobody stays very long… ahhh, the wonders of algorithmic quality scoring.

I do think the quality grading algo people should have their googleplex chef privileges revoked, but that’s just my spite showing through.

The New Google Quality score update is taking place, so I will recommend to check your Load server time. I have talking with some webhosting experts from companies that we are with them and they offered many tips about this issue, I will thank the following hosting companies that offered those tips:

Remove all unwanted service like Antivirus or anti-spam for your email server
Don’t overload your server or account adding many websites
Remove unwanted or useless PHP scripts
Decrease the images quality or size
Use a hosting company that is realiable, I have checking some landing pages advertising in Google adwords and which hosting companies they are using, from 100 landing pages I checked and approx. 15% are using network solution webhosting that means that their servers are loading just fine, they even sell virtual private servers.
If you are using Blogs as Landing Pages use a light theme and remove all unwanted plugins, as well limit the main page to 5 or less posts.

If you have any more suggestions on how to improve your server load please comment here everyone would like to know about it and improve their Quality Score, also I would recommend to download my free ebook about Adwords Quality Score.