Does The Advertiser Have A Choice Anymore?, Google committing suicide playing god? Options

[uchet]

Hi all, Adwords pain just before Christmas I could do without, so any comments would be appreciated.

I run numerous campaigns for clients and until the changes in the way Adwords works I was more than happy to accept that if a keyword didn't get enough clicks by the threshold of impressions then it didn't deserve to stay enabled. What I now have though are campaigns full of disabled keywords that haven't even had one impression.

As an example, a client, who is a business consultant (turns businesses around) had 'overwork advice' as a broad match set up. The thinking was that if a business owner was overworking then they may type in a phrase including those 'overwork advice' words. At that time, my client would have been the only advert showing because no-one else was competing. And yet, within no time at all, that keyword phrase became disabled.

Under the 'old' system, that phrase would have been given a chance and only disabled after a certain time. So my client is unable to have that phrase and there are no competitors at all - my client loses out, Google lose out from no revenue, and people searching for such queries don't have the opportunity to be helped due to the natural Google results being non-relevant in many cases. Now let's look at Overture - I could set up 'overwork advice' in there as there's still no competition (try typing it into Yahoo) and my client would gain those leads for minimal cost and wouldn't have any of the hassle they've had from Google. The only problem being (I think, I'm not great on Overture) is that they can't target the UK market only (as they've no interest in visibility outside the UK).

From the view of my clients (all small businesses), who want me to find the search terms that will gain them leads, Google used to be fantastic. We filled blank advertising space or got first page results, Google got some revenue, and the client got their leads. Now, all my clients are going mad because they can't understand why Google would stop them from having a chance to at least get to a certain number of impressions before disabling a keyword phrase (whereas it was possible before). Instead, all they're now seeing are a mass of ebay and amazon adverts that are mostly non-relevant to what's in the mind of the person typing the search query.

I'm interested in opinions - to me, it appears that Google are happy to shut out the small business market by playing god and disabling keywords immediately, based, I presume on algorithms. What will happen? My clients will use Overture etc., will instead concentrate on 'normal' search engine optimisation (which generates Google no revenue at all), and they'll start to drift towards Googles competitors to do searches because they'll view Google as having lost the plot.

I only spend about £2,000 a month with Google on Adwords on behalf of my clients, but it's still a fair amount of money. As things stand, my clients aren't picking up on business from those little gem keywords that no-one else thought of because they're instantly disabled, so they're demanding to know why they, as the advertiser don't have a choice in what keywords are used.

I'm wondering whether Google will backtrack on this new way of doing things because in my view, it's going to kill their business as people like me become disillusioned and pull my clients out of Adwords and into something else. But I'll keep an open mind if anyone has any thoughts on this subject?

[OldWelshGuy]

Hi Uchet , welcome (IMG:http://www.highrankings.com/forum/style_emoticons/default/bye1.gif) IMO much of this stems from the fact that currently there is not enough advertising space for advertisers. hence ads being dropped anywhere and everywhere via adsense.

Google is going to have to do something to protect its share of search, as if they are not careful, they could be in a whole lot of cack within months. Due to the wholesale abuse of adsense by unscrupulous webmasters and affiliate click schemes, advertisers are getting wary of content displays, choosing search results only.

G now has to maximise their ad real estate, an as such have brought in this new attitude. When MSn launches, Google might see their share decrease, a couple of % would cost them a lot of money, and, worse would had a share of the contextual advertising market to Overture via MSN.

I do not have a lot to do with PPC on any great scale, so can't really comment on anything beyond that above.

[Googlewhacked]

Hey OWG,

I'm pretty green when it comes to PPC, so forgive me if this question sound naive, but how exactly can G be "running out of advertising space"? Between the cosmically high # of various terms available with SERPs & Adsense publishers, I don't understand how they are running out of "space" (it is not like they have any physical restrictions, right?)...

Any enlightenment would be appreciated...

Phil

[OldWelshGuy]

What I am saying is that there are more advertisers than space to show them all on. If there is daily budget not being spent, then G is failing to maximise revenue, and that is bad for them. OTOH more competition = higher CPC, but this is still not ideal as it leaves advertisers not being able to advertise. Keep in mind tha Google ets paid for clicks not impressions.

PPC adspend is rising disporportionately to search volume. With more advertisers entering the marketplace daily than new searchers, eventually something has to give. With people pulling out of content matching, this puts even more pressure for Search real estate. and the only way to deliver this is more search volume.

[Haystack]

There certainly are situations where Google seems to be a bit heavy handed in their disabling of terms. While they may have some great data on the performance of various search terms in general, how are they able to determine that your ad will perform poorly? Assuming the really DO know what they're talking about, they're saving you money and improving the relevancy of their system by keeping you from proving to real searchers that your terms are relevant. Everybody wins in that situation if they're system works as intended. But does it? It sounds like you don't think so, so let Google know.

BTW, if the terms in question are in "In Trial" or "On Hold" status, there is still hope for them.

If you really are competing against eBay affiliates on some of the terms in question, maybe you should take a serious look at what they're doing differently than you with their ads?

[uchet]

"BTW, if the terms in question are in "In Trial" or "On Hold" status, there is still hope for them. "

... that would be a nice choice to have but they don't even get to that point and are disabled immediately. Here's another example of why the system is crazy. Many of my clients come to me because they know their web sites aren't optimised for search engine listings but they want a short-term fix that will get them noticed via pay per click. Taking the simplest example, which is to set up their company name as a pay per click keyword term. But what happens? "ABC Company" becomes immediately disabled even though there are no competitors for that company name, so how's a small company with limited budget going to get on the search engine ladder when Google take judgement calls like that?

I don't think that they do, but it would be heaven if Overture offered the option to just list in certain regions (like Google does) - if they did then I'd pull all my Google campaigns in no time and jump across to Overture, who I know would display my lesser-typed keyword terms as long as I'm prepared to pay for it.

Even for those keyword terms that don't get immediately disabled, it's a total mystery to me how Google works. Take the term, 'managing people' - it 'lived' for 83 impressions, had a CTR of 1.2%, is a keyword term that people use (and that are still alive), but yet Google decide to disable my one.

I think I saw somewhere that it's recommended to pull all disabled keyword terms out of a campaign and create them separately so that they don't damage the rest of the campaign which is running ok - are there any opinions on whether that's a useful thing to do or did I minsunderstand what I think I saw somewhere?

[djonline]

I'd write to Google.

I had this occur when I first set up my account. I had set up a few campaigns and 2 hours later I received an e-mail notifying me that some of my campaigns were slowed due to underperformance. I was furious! How could Google slow my account when it hadn't even generated more than a handful of impressions? Well, it turns out it was an engineering problem and my account was restored to full status.

Following is the e-mail had I submitted and the response I received from Google:


Hi,

I signed up for Adwords last night. My account went active around 7:30PM.
At 9:45 last night, I received an e-mail stating that my account had been
slowed for underperforming keywords. HUH?

My account had only been active for 2 hours. How can you tell if my
keywords are underperforming in that short of time? Secondly, I searched
under my keyphrases last night during the time in question and never saw
my ad. I still cannot find my ad anywhere. So, how does my ad underperform when it never was shown? And how do I get my ads to show?

The keywords I have chosen *are* completely targeted for the 2 products
they are advertising for. These 2 products are really niche products,
therefore, not widely searched for. If the fact that the products I would
like to target are not searched for more than a few times a day, and this
causes my ads to slow or be canceled, then how do I target something not
popular without just broadening my search for no real reason as there
really is only a few keyword phrases that describe these 2 products.

Please advise!

Sincerely,
Julie

Hello Julie,

Thank you for your email and welcome to Google AdWords.
<snip email>

<edit>Sorry Julie, but according to rule number 24:

Please don't post the full text of an email or an article, ... You may summarize it in your own words ...

Basically, email is a private communication, so we don't feel comfortable with verbatim emails (although it was helpful (IMG:http://www.highrankings.com/forum/style_emoticons/default/wink.gif) </edit>

This post has been edited by projectphp: Jan 5 2005, 02:29 AM

[Haystack]

Are you exact matching the terms?

[uchet]

I'd write to Google.

I had this occur when I first set up my account.  I had set up a few campaigns and 2 hours later I received an e-mail notifying me that some of my campaigns were slowed due to underperformance.  I was furious!  How could Google slow my account when it hadn't even generated more than a handful of impressions?  Well, it turns out it was an engineering problem and my account was restored to full status.

That's interesting Julie. When I contacted Google saying basically the same I got a standard reply from them which basically said that the 1000 impressions limit didn't apply any more. At that point I gave up on them and turned to forums such as this one, then Christmas happened and here we are. In hindsight I should have persisted with Google, not giving up until I got a proper response.

[cline]

One of my clients is a direct competitor to your client.

I've never targeted "overwork advice" because IMHO it's not related closely enough with turnaround consulting. It does not surprise me that the term got disabled.

This should not be considered to be a big deal.

This seems to me to be a keyword the client thinks is great but the marketplace doesn't. It's really quite typical for there to be "insider speak" that doesn't match the terms the marketplace uses.

[LibbyLu]

One thing you might try is to click on the ad yourself to make sure that it got at least one hit. This may buy you some time.

[dmatson]

I think I saw somewhere that it's recommended to pull all disabled keyword terms out of a campaign and create them separately so that they don't damage the rest of the campaign which is running ok - are there any opinions on whether that's a useful thing to do or did I minsunderstand what I think I saw somewhere?

Can anyone confirm if this is true? Why exactly would underperforming keywords damage the rest of the campaign? Isn't each keyword rated individually?

I've also been quite discouraged by removal of my low impression keywords as well. I just don't understand why they would yank an ad before it gets any impressions, when there is no competition for the keywords.