How to Survive the Google AdWords Update of July 2006

[andreww38]

havent seen this here yet. i found it useful.
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Latest Google changes recently and it has been getting a lot of attention.

It's been a tough week for a lot of AdWords advertisers. With the recent update of Google's landing page algorithm, many marketers that had been paying five or ten cents a click (or less) are now required to bid at least 50 cents to a dollar or more. There are also reports of some advertisers who have kept their bid prices, but those bids are now buying only 3rd or 4th page ad positions, where they used to buy first page positions.

Note that not all AdWords accounts have been affected - ads going to large sites with lots of content have seen no changes to their bid prices.

Four kinds of sites are hardest hit:

1.One page sales letter websites

2.Squeeze pages (landing pages whose sole purpose is to gather an email address
in exchange for a free report)

3.AdSense sites (particularly AdSense arbitrage sites)

4.Affiliate sites

Get into the details of what's changed and how to deal with it:

===> http://www.affiliateclassroom.com/x.cgi?...d=321&p=14

[triumph]

Andrew thanks for the information. One thing I gathered from people who complained a lot were they often had e-mail or fill-in forms as their landing page that were barriers to going any further. I am pretty sure Google hates that.

Anyways, thanks for the information!

[zach]

I don't understand how bid prices can be raised because of an algorithm change. I always thought that the principle is that all ads start off at the same price (bid), and as advertisers pay more than the current bid to get the top result, the price of the bid goes up. If this is only an algorithm change, and assuming millions of advertisers haven't been added over night, why is the price suddenly higher per bid?

[deelip]

I never used google adwords.
But this is quite fine information.May be its usefull if i got a adword coupon . I have just asked with a guy for that.

[triumph]

zach Wrote:I don't understand how bid prices can be raised because of an algorithm change. I always thought that the principle is that all ads start off at the same price (bid), and as advertisers pay more than the current bid to get the top result, the price of the bid goes up. If this is only an algorithm change, and assuming millions of advertisers haven't been added over night, why is the price suddenly higher per bid?

They changed the program so there is a quality component now. So your price can be inflated due to the quality score. So basicaly if Google deems your site to be of a lower quality you will pay more per click. I believe the intent is to get people to improve the quality of their landing pages, not to necessarily get people to pay higher click prices.

I consider it a soft ban as in many cases the click prices will go to $10.00 from .10.

[Slashmire]

Interesting, I didn't even know that such change were occuring/occured; nice to know, seems to be in a good direction too.

[sunnybeachcal]

This is quite informative, you're always good on keeping us on top of things. Thanks, Andrew!