Google AdWords - Bid Gouging
This post ties in with my "Understanding the Adwords Formula" post and provides a little more perspective on what Google wants from you -- money.
Lately, I've had a good deal of success with several of my campaigns. I won't discuss how much quite yet, but we'll just say my new record kick's the old record's ass.
Moving forward- I've had a chance to dance a bit more with Google AdWords over the last few weeks. And when I say dance, I don't mean the nice kind. When I started a campaign recently, I saw great success in the first twenty-four-or-so hours. My wife and I couldn't be happier and we were both in disbelief. Our disbelief proved correct when Google proceeded to slap us down with the fury of Zeus. Our minimum bids went from being under $1.00 (profitable) right up to $10.00 (not profitable). I'll admit, I hadn't been more pissed off in quite some time and yet I'd never felt so helpless.
After that point, I had a good friend of mine do a test using his account to see whether he could achieve similar success. He didn't want to spend quite as much, but lo and behold, he saw a similar success but without fail, was slapped down by the mighty hand of Google.
What we've learned in the ensuing weeks could prove more valuable than any advice we've ever read in blogs or e-books and so far, that has been true:
Google just wants more money.
Yes, it's that simple. After increasing the bids on both our accounts for a period of about three to four days, Google started displaying our ads again (even though it said otherwise in our accounts). Sure, we lost money but were able to slowly adjust the knob back down to break-even and finally, to profit. I'll warn you - we lost thousands - but it will be returned to us within a few days and with what we've learned, we can now apply it to our other campaigns and Google-slapped keywords to return them to the SERPS and now you can, too.
So if you're feeling helpless because big brother Google has taken away your keywords, worry no more! If you've got a little money to burn, Google seems to accept bribes. Apparently, they just want to know you're serious.
And that's all there is to it.
Popularity: 19% [?]
January 20th, 2008 at 5:53 am
Pretty ruthless on Google’s part. Of course, they want to maximize revenue as much as you do, but when they hold all the cards it doesn’t seem that they’re “doing no evil.”
This only hurts the small player. Maybe Google could consider helping out the little guy and only doing this to the big kids in the game…even things out somewhat like they did with the paid links.
January 20th, 2008 at 4:09 pm
I’m not following you. So you increased your bids to meet the minimum $5 - $10 and then eventually adjusted them down? Or you moved your bids higher, but not high enough to meet the minimum and suddenly they just happened to start getting traffic again?
January 20th, 2008 at 6:57 pm
@J.D.: Well, as much as I agree with you, aside from Google being a bit evil in this practice, it’s the people who take advantage of the low bid prices that causes them to enforce quality standards. Google really just wants to maintain their spotless reputation. The trouble is, they don’t seem to care much in the way of customer service.
January 20th, 2008 at 6:57 pm
@Skip: The latter.
January 21st, 2008 at 8:56 am
I tried that as well previously. Google was asking for minimum bid $5 and I bumped mine up to $2.50 to see if it would eventually accept it and it never did. One a $5 minimum bid asking price, what did you have to move it up to for Google to eventually push some traffic your way? What about on $10 min?
January 21st, 2008 at 11:54 am
@Skip: How long did you wait for it to accept your $2.50?
I actually had to move it up to $2.00 from $1.00 to get it going.
I would never do a $10 minimum unless the payout was justifiably so high.
January 21st, 2008 at 4:27 pm
I have it set to $2.50 cents now for the past week or so and it still hasn’t went live or received any impressions.
January 21st, 2008 at 9:46 pm
@Skip: Hmm, well. Perhaps for the keyword you’re bidding on, you might need to bid a bit higher to trigger the re-consideration. That’s what I’d bet on. But it’s risky business.
February 5th, 2008 at 1:11 am
As someone who is mid-google-slap at the moment, I’d just like to say thanks for this post.
I think you should get a government grant to set up some kind of google-slap self help group.
February 5th, 2008 at 10:19 am
@Chris: Haha.. you know, that’s not a bad idea. I was pretty shaken when it happened to me. Somebody went screeeech on the record.
July 6th, 2008 at 4:01 pm
so far, it seems to me (i’m actually selling something; i’m not an affiliate marketer) that google really does try to trick you into, among other things, bidding against yourself. there is simply no other explanation for why the minimum bid goes up every single day at midnight, when i am the ONLY advertiser on a certain keyword. so far as the “quality” baloney goes, i’m the only advertiser on some of my keywords who is actually selling what he says he’s selling. ironically, the most “misleading” of my ads (compared to the keyword, not the actual product) are the ones google seems to think are the “highest” quality.
well, two can play this hustle. i keep my google adwords spending under $1 per day, and simply publish a new ad every day in order to build TOMA through impressions, and don’t even go for clicks. i’m getting 100,000 impressions per week for less than $5. and the whole time, google thinks they’re hustling ME. this kind of old-fashioned marketing takes time, but in the long run, it’s working as a supplement to my other marketing. but as far as google adwords ppc goes, in and of itself it’s worthless to me.