Just updated previous post as you added this , the landing page was the merchant page . I assume they (or perhaps the merchant?) decided they didn't like the direct traffic , or it was against some rule or as you say the landing page quality on th emerchant end (though it looks very nice to me).
It's a real mine field PPC , when you get penalised and as always no reason given by Google Adwords.
It can be hit and miss sending traffic to the merchant direct because of course you can't control the landing page. Recently I set up a campaign which had display url as www.me.co.uk and destination url as www.me.co.uk/default.aspx?k=keyword which would redirect to the appropriate merchant landing page.
This was given a minimum bid that was too high to be profitable, I wrote a bit of script to allow me to have Keyword.me.co.uk as the display and destination url, this brought the minimum bid down to a level that would be profitable and it's sat their quite happily ever since. Presumably just having the keyword in the url was enough.
No guarantee this will work for you but often it's small things that make a difference, probably just a case of experimenting to find something that works.
Latest problem ... i placed a maximum bid price of 7p a click , and received 33 clicks in about half an hour ?
Now Google adwords has paused the campaign and upped the minimum bid to £2.50 !!!
Quite a hike from 4p to £2.50
Did this happen a couple of days after you created your adwords account? Google has a habit of doing this sort of thing after your 'open season' (time Google allows your ads to build up some sort of history) period expires.
Hi there - It happended pretty quickly about 12 hours after creating the Google Advert - but was no traffic for first 11 hours then a huge spurt over 30 mins ish (during the time i was watching the 1 o'clock news) , then the min bid price hike was imposed by Google , also created about 50 other campaigns (with niche and broad terms of a few hundred keywords) which resulted in just 4 clicks across all of them , most never even got off the ground despite being active (av bid price was 4p). I have tried PPC on a number of my site , some seem to have a good quality rating , and allow 4p bids other are effectively bannerd with £2.50 or even £5 minimum bids . But maybe banning / penalising me is doing me a favour , as even a £3 loss is a lot to me at the moment! All paused now (again).
I might give the redirect page script a try - thanks for suggestion - (next time i feel enthusisastic / can afford the plunge).
Thanks for suggestions i will try them out for fun , on a low budget (pennies rather than pounds) trial sometime .
This happened to me when I first started out with ppc, but if you create a good well thought out landing page with some decent keyword content you can live happily off 2-3p clicks.
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Andrew Clapham - Fashion Blogger & Fashion Discount Codes.
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