ClickBankSuccessForum.com

mark · Posted: Tue Jul 11, 2006 7:15 am Post subject: What's going on?

I have a number of simple landing pages pointing toward CB products and ovenight I have had keywords that I've had for many months and in some cases over a year that have cost 3-20c and have enjoyed very good ctr inactivated and now will cost $10 to reactivate!!! One ad group points straight toward the vendors site and keywords in that group have been bumped to $10. From what I understand, it is due to googles new 'landing page quality' rules. If the vendors site itself is no longer considered 'content rich' or of sufficient quality despite the fact that it has been around for years and making many many sales everyday then surely potentially hundreds of CB products are going to become 'unadvertisable' with google? As far as visitors are concerned, they have obviously considered my landing page and the vendors page as containing enough relevent information that they have purchased the product otherwise I wouldn't have been advertising with google for the last 2 years. Yet another google change that's going to cost us dearly. Last Augusts changes meant that I didn't earn anything for a month until things started to 'settle down' and got sorted out properly. This could cost google, affiliates and vendors globally, millions of dollars, hopefully if it hurts google in the pocket too much they will reconsider things.

homewebbiz · Joined: 09 May 2005 Posts: 159

Google has gone over the deep end. I too have been running some 5 cent keywords for as long as I can remember and they are now $5.00-$10.00.

And I am also finding that the New Google Optimasation proposal Is NO help either. The keywords are much to vague for my liking. Evil or Very Mad

And to much per click

Electroman · Joined: 11 Jul 2006 Posts: 42

For more information about why google raised the bid price please visit
http://adwords.blogspot.com/2006/07/landing-page-quality-update.html

I believe what google is doing is to make advertisers to create ads that is highly relevant to the landing page with the right keywords. For example, if you are promoting a product about how to start a daycare, you need to create ads that have the words "start a daycare" in the title, description, and if possible the url too! And the keywords are:
start a daycare
how to start a daycare
and etc.
This way you could increase the quality score without bidding high.

dmin7b5 · Joined: 05 Jul 2006 Posts: 1

Has anybody else experienced the sudden and dramatic increases in CPC prices. Keywords that were .03 to .10 all of a sudden went up to $5.00 to $10.00 yikes .......... is there a way around this?

This makes it pretty difficult to test campaigns and run new ads ....... Anybody else out there feeling the pain from this???

homewebbiz · Joined: 09 May 2005 Posts: 159

Electroman · Joined: 11 Jul 2006 Posts: 42

Google's new changes affecting those who running the adsense arbitrage system that don't provide useful contents. I have just tested the redirect page to hop link to see if any problems or not. To my surprised it also affected those who are using redirect page. I created an adgroup with an url redirect to hop link and all of the keywords prices are between 1.00 to 5.00. However when i recreated another adgroup with similar keywords but direct link to clickbank ie:http://nickname.vendor.hop.clickbank.net all of the keywords are back to normal under 10 cents!
In your case, since all of your keywords are in the $10 range, what you can do is to pause this adgroup and create another similar adgroup with lithium ion batteries in title and description and using lithium ion batteries as keywords, another ad group -battery charger and so on. If the keywords bid price still remaining high, try removing the adsense code and re do again the same procedure mentioned above.
My adsense payouts in these few days were generally high, could it be due to this changes, no one knows!

Nosferatu · Joined: 30 Apr 2005 Posts: 9

This new update by Google doesn't make sense to me, Min CPC for all keywords were between 0.01 -0.05c - now they are inactive and require $1.00 bids to have them active.

Campaign is converting between 5% - 7%, if the users or "adwords specialists" have found my ad/keywords less relevant - why am i converting? duh
Advertisers are getting annoyed each day with Adwords, could it just be the end of Adwords?

darkalice · Joined: 24 May 2006 Posts: 36

As of today, all my best selling ad group, campagins and keywords
are in the 10$ and north range.
this includes my review boards and direct link to vendor sites.
my sales have dropped to 0.
i am stopping all my campaigns until i figure out what to do next.
if you ask me google have googled themselves too far this time..
and it will cost everyone..affiliates , vendors , clickbank and google of course.
i am currently examing the possibility to move to a more friendly enviourment such as overture.

i am also trying to figure out how to fix my ad groups but at this point it seems unlikely i will succeed.
especially in the case where i send directly to the vendor and still
the vendors content in not rich enough for google.
Evil or Very Mad

Nosferatu · Joined: 30 Apr 2005 Posts: 9

Google says "only a small number of advertisers will be affected" by this new update - I have a funny feeling that G wants all affiliate related ads to move onto Content network by enforcing higher bids on Search Network. ARGH!

ginginca · Joined: 20 May 2006 Posts: 28 Location: Canada

I started running google campaigns for the first time a few months ago.

I was unable to get ANY 5 cent keywords after trying lots of different industries. So I just put it on the back burner.

All the guides I have bought (lots of them highly recommended on this forum) talk about purchasing cheap traffic from google. I haven't seen anything yet.

chanceb · Joined: 24 Nov 2004 Posts: 30

These problems started for me the end of April. I had, had a fairly stable traffic/income for the previous 2 to 3 years. I now make about 15% of what I made before the end of April. I definitely have had a love/hate relationship with google, but now with this last stunt it's staying at hate! I've always been able to adjust to all of google little changes, but so far this one has baffled me????

DW · Joined: 22 May 2005 Posts: 305

Google searching for keywords of mass destruction?

Who really knows anymore...

Google is starting to run Adwords like a Government agency. Pinch'n them pennies out of the little guy and feeding the rich.

I remember when spending enough on Google Adwords to pay cash for a house every year would mean something. But not anymore to Google. I used to get phone calls, now emails.

So buy rich I mean eBay and a few others that obviously get special treatment. You know what I mean...

Who else can bypass the "Quailty score" when it comes to relevant ad servings with ads like "Whatever you're looking for, you can find it on eBay" - Not long ago, I actually seen this exact ad under the keyword VOLCANOES!

Doesn't say much for keyword and landing page quality score now does it?

I am really thinking about tossing up a site to voice everyones concerns in the form of...

1.) A poll on bid prices- to the number of advertisers these updates effect.

2.) A petition as to a more stable and econimical minimum bid requirement. - not the, "we feel your keyword ____ is worth this amount." even though no one else is using it?

3.) And last but not least... an affiliate boycott of Adwords for one full day. (This would take a little planning - but very doable) Imagine the amount of lost dollars that would impose on Google - enough to get their attention?

Google needs to realize that if it were not for affiliates, Adwords would never have become what it is today and Google would be just another 3rd rate search engine.

Of course, the only way a boycott would work is if a great number of affiliates participated. It's worth a thought anyway. I mean, wouldn't it be nice to turn the tables on the big "G" by having them wake up in the morning for a change and wonder what the heck happened?

How many of you have woke up to that scenario? I know I have... and I sell my own products. Some of them for years with the same keywords and sites. So I know it's not a question of being relevant.

A quote to live by - "Expect what you accept."

homewebbiz · Joined: 09 May 2005 Posts: 159

Electroman · Joined: 11 Jul 2006 Posts: 42

Yesterday 50% of my adgroups been hit with high bids and today 80%!!!!!
I guess google just want us to be more specific and relevant. If you are promoting a dog training product and the sales page does not have the word "doberman" or whatever the names of all the dogs. And if you key in the keyword "training doberman" or "how to train a doberman" google still find both keywords not relevant and will increase your bid price, unless your merchant sales page did mention how to train a doberman. In other words, thinking out of the box keywords may not help because those keywords are not mentioned in the landing page.
All redirect page is dead now and what you need to do is move on and create ads and landing page that is higly relevant of course this will take us a lot of time (one keyword one landing page and then redirect to the merchant sales in order to avoid competitions). If you think for the long term it may help the users to get what they want and might increase our conversion.

Sometimes i got frustrated also searching something in google. For example; searching for the keyword "what is hemorrhoids"
you saw the ads in the title "Hemorrhoids Explanation" and the description-all you need to know about hemorrhoids. But when i clicked on the ads do you know what are the page that appeared-It's full of hemorrhoids cream pictures and price. I thought to myself hey this is not what i want. I quit that page and click on another quite similar ads, same thing happen again-adsense ads with very little non related content! I don't get what i searched for, google reputation affected, advertiser don't get any sales and user don't get what they want. It waste everyone's time.

True when Nosferatu said:
Campaign is converting between 5% - 7%, if the users or "adwords specialists" have found my ad/keywords less relevant - why am i converting? duh

To the Big Brother Google, it is still not good enough. That's mean you might have 100 keywords and only few of them are converting and the rest google found it to be non relevant and wants you to create ads that is more superb, highly and laser targeted keywords. Google just want us to be more hardworking and focus. The era of throwing all keywords into a campaign or adgroup to wait for sales is over.

Well, it seems that starting today i have to burn midnight oils again to revamp all of my campaigns, never look back and let's go to work!

vash · Joined: 12 Nov 2005 Posts: 20

This turned over 1,000 highly targetted adgroup useless today...

I dont think its the redirect thing- as I have anotgher campaign that has a redirect URL and was unaffected.

Sad day for me, I could have potentially lost thousands of dollars a month!
_________________
Mike

darkalice · Joined: 24 May 2006 Posts: 36

mark · Posted: Wed Jul 12, 2006 6:26 am Post subject:

Well, forums everywhere are filling up with advertisers whose business has been ruined overnight. There will be a serious 'knock on' effect to CB and many others too I would imagine, after all the majority of product sales are from affiliates with fairly basic or no landing pages at all and (were) advertising with G.

Im just a small fish spending around $40k a year with them (everything paused so now it's zero), BUT there are a lot of us small fish out there AND from what Im reading, there are a lot of bigger fish that have been hit to.

G are answerable to shareholders now aren't they? I'd love to hear how there gonna explain a MASSIVE drop in advertising revenue overnight. There's talk of a mass boycott but then they've kind of done that to themselves already.

Why should a simple landing page or vendors site have to be full of whatever kind of content G are looking for? I don't want to read pages and pages of content before I buy something, I just want to see the main features/benefits and make a decision don't you? What's the problem about where an ad is placed if the ad is clear about what is on offer and the page your taken to relates to the ad and it's relevancy has been proven with good CTR (and sufficient sales). None of us would be continuing to advertise under certain keywords if visitors weren't finding it relevant and making sufficient purchases for us to maintain our advertising under any given keyword right?

Even IF, and it's a big 'IF' they reverse this current system change (can't see them totally backtracking on anything really) they will have lost a lot of customers trust, confidence and possibly business permanently. Well done G, they could certainly create a content rich site on how to ruin internet advertisers businesses 'en masse' overnight.

Harvey Segal · Site Admin Joined: 23 Mar 2004 Posts: 2343

homewebbiz · Joined: 09 May 2005 Posts: 159

Ok if this is right

Electroman · Joined: 11 Jul 2006 Posts: 42

Let me ask all of you a question-what will you want to achieve if you are already strong? The answer is you want to become even stronger. That's what happen to our Big Brother Google! They just want to dominate anything that is relate to the internet. They are venturing into many areas and getting even more powerful! They can do anything that they wanted to. They just dropped a bomb while we were sleeping and no chance for us to defend ourselve. At least they give us some grace period for us to prepare what actually google want from our landing page! Yes you may say is already mentioned in the adword's blog. Who has the time to everyday read the adword's blog? But most of us do check our account everyday am i right?
Just put up a notice where they used to put when their system will be down on what date and what time. This way we will notice it and will do the necessary changes according to their request. With this simple method everyone would be happy-Google, the advertisers and the users. No point for me to discuss more as now google already implemented the changes. Hope only miracle can happen as i could feel the sadness in 10 or even hundreds of thousands of affiliates suffering the losses from this adword dance! Who and what is Google if not because of we as an affiliates using their services to generate billions of dollars year after year to them? There's a saying "biting the hands who feed you".

No matter how bad shape we are in now, the journey have to go on. Let's go to work now!