Minimum Bid – $10.00 on Google PPC
Yes, you read that title correctly. When I logged in to my company’s AdWords account (despite my personal feelings about Google, the company still uses them) today, I was welcomed with this message:
22 keyword(s) are currently inactive for search.
These keywords are marked in the Status column of the Keywords tab below. Improve their quality through optimization, delete them, or raise the keywords’ maximum CPCs to the minimum bids indicated. (Raising the bids to at least the minimum will activate the keywords.)
Now obviously I knew about Google’s planned release of the Quality Score information, however, Google has already been using this information to calculate the minimum bid. And, despite Google’s assurances that the Quality Score information release was in preparation for an update to AdWords, I was fully expecting prices to go up. I just didn’t think it would happen so quickly. So, you can imagine my surprise when I saw that the minimum bid for those 22 terms was $10.00! That’s right, 10 bucks per click!
To top it all off, those terms are all variations of our Company Name! For example, Acme, Incorporated, Acme Inc, Acme Co. etc. Before you all go pointing to the Quality Score let me explain that we mention our company name on the landing page multiple times, spell it out completely, and have the name in our ads as well. The best part of the whole thing, we’ve been given a “great” score (and low minimum bid) for a shortened version of our name (Acme Inc.) but a poor score for the spelled out version. Tell me how that makes sense?
Google, you’ve got some ‘splainin to do!
The best/worst part of the whole thing is that Google is currently causing their advertisers to miss out on millions of dollars worth of profits. Our campaigns for example lost 75% of our clicks. When I called AdWords support (1-866-2Google or 1-866-246-6453) they assured me that they knew about the issue and were working to fix it as we spoke. They of course couldn’t tell me when it would be fixed, nor could they tell me whether or not the currently inactive terms would automatically return to active status but hey, it’s Google right? They don’t do anything wrong…
As if that weren’t bad enough, Barry at SE Roundtable (I just realized that I’ve been calling it SEO Roundtable for a long long time. Sorry Barry!) has a story about Google charging advertisers for campaigns that have been paused! So, not only are they jacking up the minimum bids (even though they told the Marketing Pilgrim and Search Engine Land that those changes wouldn’t go into effect until next week) but they are also charging people even after they pause their campaigns. I guess it’s a good thing they released this Quality Score information to help keep people informed once they finally do make more changes, otherwise they would have really pissed their advertisers off…
Don’t worry, I won’t say I told you so… I’ll just leave you with the link to my previous post on this matter.
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I just got off the phone with my AdWords rep – they’re working on it: “it’s our top priority”. He assured me it should be fixed in the next day or so.
I’m sure that filled you with as much confidence as it did me… Some of the smartest minds in the world and they can’t seem to release anything without Fishing it up first…
What’s peculiar is that they didn’t roll back this buggy code as soon as they started getting reports. AdWords is broken. Somebody broke it. That’s pretty darn lame.
Richard, that’s a VERY good point as well. I hadn’t even thought of that. Why not just “un-update” so to speak and get everyone’s ads back up and running like they should. You should have been able to get enough data to debug the code. I mean for crying out loud it’s been a complete business day. I can only imagine how much money Google’s lost, but I can only hope it’s enough to cost a few idiots their jobs and teach the other ones how to properly run an update (maybe do it in the middle of the night huh? just a tip).
Anyway thanks for the comment, Richard. Anyone who hasn’t done so already should click over and read his post about this subject. He’s also got an interesting post about distribution fraud facing Google as well. Check em out!
Looks like the update got rolled back because you can’t select Show Quality Score within the customize columns dropdown.
One of my clients had words no one were bidding for, and they got this $10 per click requirement. I just put the words in phrase match and this $10 per click requirement went away. I can’t complain, its more targeted that way anyway to keep it in phrase match.
I am managing several accounts for different clients and only the newer accounts seem to be affected by this issue i.e. older campaigns that have been running for over 3-4 months seem to be unaffected.
The really annoying thing is Google seem to be deactivating even the most relevant of keywords! And also keywords with a CTR of over 5%!
Sometimes when i upload new keywords, most of them are automatically deactivated right away!
The Google reps keep playing the same record, “quality score quality score and a number of other factors”! ITS HELLA ANNOYING!!!