Google Adwords Slap of 5th March 08

[HarveyC]

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Minimum bids up to £5, and poor quality score on a number of campaigns here.

Wasn't anything about it on here, so if you've had the same problem find info on this page:

All keywords magicly became inactive?

Would be interesting to hear posts from an affiliate perspective.

[tbp]

Bugger!

Well that explains my low sales today, must admit I don't check adwords that often now.

Half of mine have gone up to £2.50, the rest £5!

10 out of 480 left active, and they are really bizarre ones, misspellings that aren't on my landing page - would of thought they would have been the ones to go.

This has got to be a bug! Can't see any way it could be a legitimate update, especially as I had a great quality score up till now, and the campaign has been doing really well for the last 5 - 6 months.

Going to try swapping over the domain, and seeing if that makes a difference - fingers crossed!

Thanks for the heads up! Stupidly didn't check adwords and just thought I was having a bad day. Will let you know if the domain change works (it has done before, so i`m hoping).

[HarveyC]

(it has done before, so i`m hoping).

Same here - the most interesting thing is the same thing happened to a site of mine about 6 months ago, and I transferred it to a new domain, after adding new content, privacy policy, contact page etc. - 6 months later and it happens all over again!

[DioBach]

I wonder if they're just targeting affiliate sites? It's been on the cards.

[tbp]

I`ve tried switching to a different domain I already had, but unfortunately no difference.

Also tried deleting all the keywords and adding them again, but again not difference.

Going to buy a brand new domain and try that now, and if that doesn't work all I can do is give up.

I really do think this is a cock up though, an Algo gone out of control or something - the amount of people who seem to have been hit for no reason suggests google is going to lose huge amounts of revenue!

UPDATE: In the last 10 minutes, 5 of the remaining 10 keywords have also been marked inactive!

UPDATE 2: Now the rest have gone, been wiped out totally now!

[tbp]

I wonder if they're just targeting affiliate sites? It's been on the cards.

Just been looking at my particular area, and there are very few ad's left.

However, the ones that are left are all true merchant sites, all the affiliates have gone.

It may be they are targeting affiliate sites, but surely they are going to lose a hell of a lot of money doing this!

I`ve decided not to do any more now, will just sit back and see what happens, not going to put a load of work in when it may not help, and it could just be an error.

[Affi Liate]

This is a disaster.

I just checked my accounts and found I had one of my keywords slapped!

Check it out here:

"Increase quality or bid £0.03 to activate"

I'm ruined.

Affi Tastic

Edit: OK That's a bit harsh...

Just been chatting with TBP and I know it can have a very adverse effect.

I'd do nothing for 48 hours - see what happens.

Like the song:

"Don't go changing...."

....Just yet...

Af.

[ian-d]

lol.

I've been affected too, didn't realise either until tonight, damn google, you hit only my biggest earner!!!

But never mind

Have dropped adwords an email for an explanation, this should be interesting

[KirstyM]

Pfft.... interesting?!

Yeah...

"Dear Scummy Affiliate,

We really can't be ars*d giving you a personal response to your question RE: Why Have You Killed All My Ads?

We therefore are sending you our bog standard impersonal reply which won't actually answer your question. We are aware this will irritate you... its just that we don't give a damn!"

[DioBach]

Just a thought, if it is targeting on affiliate links - are the ones getting slapped using masked links or the clean affiliate link? Wonder if it's worth thinking about (I think it was Jason Duke said it here) running your affiliate links through to a secure site and redirecting via cart.php or some similar ruse to make you look like a merchant. Spotted one of my sites has been spanked as well.

[ian-d]

To help rule it out, my merchant businesses which use a seperate adwords account are fine, and most of my affiliate sites are too, using the same link process as one that has been slapped, so there doesn't seem to be much of a pattern!

I got an automated response from google like Kirsty, so have replied back to them having a go, won't do any good though, i asked them for compensation to cover my losses

All i've done this morning is re-create the campaign, just add new, copy the existing, use the same url's as before etc and everything is up and running again, the only problem is you won't have continued reports on keyword impressions from months ago etc, but i can live without that for this one, its none important!!!

[drivetowin]

One interesting point from the WMW thread is that the quality score now appears to be based across your whole domain rather than just on the landing page.

Now I'm guessing here but merchant sites may well retain a high QS as they will typically have lots of pages related to the same product range/type whereas ppc affiliate landing pages may be much more of a mishmash - i.e one page about pressure washers, another about lingerie, all on the same domain.

I also wonder whether if your site is really thin and let's say has a page hoover-washer-dryer.php and a contact us page and privacy policy page (you are including those?), but no index.php or other clearly indentifiable home page that Google is marking down the QS.

Just guesses on my part I'll admit, but maybe food for thought?

[ian-d]

Wouldn't have though so drivetowin, as i have thinner sites than others and they've not been slapped, plus all my sites have index.php or index.html pages. However, definatly dont and never had had a problem with this problem on my merchant sites, so makes you wonder!

[tbp]

Tried to fix this this morning, but no joy

Tried deleting the campaign and setting up a new one, using a different URL pointing to the same site, but the minute the keywords are entered they are just marked as invalid straight away.

So nothing left I can do about this now, seeing as this was my main campaign Im now no longer going to use Adwords.

Nice one Google!

I`ve spent over £1000 in the last 5 months, and although its a drop in the ocean to them, if you take it across all the affiliates who's campaigns got killed, its going to add up to a lot of money!

What gets me is the site is extremely relevant, entirely based around the product I was advertising. It had about 10 relevant pages, so wasn't just a one page wonder. On top of that it's number 1 in google, so this conflicts massively with a poor quality score. With a conversion rate of around 50 - 60%, the public obviously thought it was relevant as well, so what Googles got to gain by this I have no idea.

[ian-d]

and knowing the site in question i can fully back that up, your site is more relevant than the merchants selling the product, so i can't think its anything but being an affiliate site, which is worrying.