Comments on: Landing Pages Now Influence AdWords Quality Scores

By: milette

milette — Mon, 19 Dec 2005 17:45:45 +0000

Google hides behind the wall of secrecy to obscure and obfuscate their real policies and practices. In one experiment I did after Google changed their pricing model — I pasted 1,000 keywords into AdWords account A and 915 keywords were disabled instantly demanding additional pay-per-click. (I bid originally $.05 ad the same keywords were running happily before the price model change.) Into another AdWords Account (B), I pasted the exact same list of keywords, and surprisingly over 900 of them were ACCEPTED at the $.05 per click bid.

What was the difference between the accounts? Accounts A and B had been running for nearly the same amount of years. Account A had relatively low monthly billing (less than $20 per mont), while Account B had a very large budget (over $5,000 per month).

Nowhere in Google’s AdWords program do they EVER mention that they treat different customers differently — but this is obviously the case. I can give many other examples.

Regarding Google’s new AdWords pricing model — they SAY that it will allow you to pay as little as $.01 per click — but what they don’t tell you is that it will be a cold day in hell before you’ll FIND any keywords that you can actually buy for that amount.

Out of over 10,000 keywords I had running before the price model change, over 99% were rejected the day after — demanding up to $5.00 per click for keywords that ran happily the previous day for $.05 per click (with excellent CTR).

Do no evil my ##.

Marty R. Milette
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By: charmedlover

charmedlover — Tue, 13 Dec 2005 20:49:41 +0000

I think anyone really trying to sell something will already meet these requirements anyways. It’s part of the holy marketing concept that you have to make consumers happy, and this is how they’re doing it.

Honestly I don’t think that Google should have to tell you to do this, it should be implied.

By: Ben

Ben — Tue, 13 Dec 2005 19:07:30 +0000

Google keeps referring to their guidelines as if they contain some sort of answer or solution, but they pretty much neglect the guidelines when it matters – serps.

I expect they’ll fall back on the “You can trust us, our motto is don’t be evil” line so commonly touted whenever Google is mentioned.

If I had to guess I would say they’re doing this because Analytics might make a few people reconsider AdWords – if they’ve concrete evidence that x in 100 people are a sale and the profit from x doesn’t cover the advertising & time it would be a sound decision to just pull the plug on AdWords.

That + YPN and soon MSN’s advertising programs may make Google look less appealing, so naturally Google want to boost (or force) an increase in the chance of a sale.