If you use Google Adwords to buy PPC advertising, you’ve no doubt noticed some changes to your accounts over the weekend. It seems that Google has launched their update that takes into heavy consideration landing pages when determining your minimum CPC, ranking and whether or not your ads even show up.
Just to review, Google has always used a combination of click-through-rate (CTR) and your maximum cost-per-click (CPC) when determining your rank in the paid listings section of their results page. If your CTR wasn’t high enough, your CPC was too low or some combination of those factors, your ads will be inactivated by Google until you raise the CPC to a new “minimum.” The logic here is that only ads with high CTRs make it to the top of the results. Makes sense.
Now, Google is also inspecting the landing page that the ads point to to make sure it’s relevant to the ad with the goal of providing a more positive experience for the Google user, oh AND helping Google’s bottom line, I’m sure. From Google:
“Although it is counter-intuitive to some who hear it, we’d rather show one less ad than to show an ad which leads to a poor user experience — since long-term user trust in AdWords is of overarching importance.”
In true Google fashion, however, the change has been dramatic, without adequate warning to advertisers or its own employees, and is causing lots of heartburn among many advertisers. Minimum CPCs have gone through the roof making them unrealistic for most advertisers. Again, from Google:
“We realize that some minimum bids may be too high to be cost-effective — indeed, these high minimum bids are our way of motivating advertisers to either improve their landing pages or to simply stop using AdWords for those pages, while still giving some control over which keywords to advertise on.”
Even though Google states that, “that the vast majority of advertisers will not be affected at all by this change,” there is a lot of talk on the blogs and forums since the changes took place at the end of last week (nearly 30 pages of posts on Webmaster World) making me doubt that it’s that isolated among larger advertisers. One person I spoke to who manages several Adwords accounts said that for one account nearly 90% of their terms have been deactivated. That’s enough for anyone to lose lots of sleep over.
Here are some posts, discussions and insights on the matter:
- WebMaster World Discussion: Open letter to Google Regarding Changes to The Ad Words Program
- Google – Landing page quality update
- SearchEngineWatch – Many Advertisers Are Frustrated With Google’s New Quality Score & Pricing
- Search Engine Roundtable – AdWords Landing Page Quality Score Causing Epidemic
It seems that Google Adwords is setting itself up to be usable only by advertising agencies or companies large enough to employ dedicated PPC staff, which is unfortunate. One of the great things about advertising on PPC networks has been that a company doing business out of the garage could always compete head-to-head with major corporations and suppliers…
[...] I’ll bet that when Q3 numbers come out we’ll see an even greater proportional increase in the take for the engines. With 60% of the market share, Google’s recent update is bound to boost its take considerably. [...]