It seems like I’m not the only affiliate who’s been affected by Adwords going nuts on a ton of accounts. I logged in yesterday to see a lot of my search campaigns slapped with $5.00-10.00 minimum bids. They must have done a quality score update, because people are getting slapped left and right.
For example, I’ve had one campaign running since November, so about a solid 4 months. CTR has been 14% lifetime for that campaign overall, and my quality score was great 100% of the time with $0.02 minimum bids. Spending was about $2,700/day on that campaign. Landing page was fine, links, content, etc. it was a functional site. Does this deserved to be slapped? I didn’t think so, but apparently Google did. They went on a spree or something, because most of my search campaigns on personal AND corporate accounts got slapped. I’m sure once I call up Google they’ll hopefully be able to do something about it and remove the slap, but it seems like they did some default automated action to go in and jack up everybody’s bids. There’s a discussion going on about this at Wickedfire, so you and I aren’t the only ones that have been slapped. Here’s a quote from that thread :
truth been told. This was my best site. Over 100 pages of unique content, blog posts excluded,
And I have been slapped 980 degrees around.
It seems that even those with huge content sites are getting slapped as well.
Am I no longer an UberAffiliate and going broke? Haha nooo, my income has taken a slight to moderate temporary hit, but things will bounce back and my accounts will be running fine soon enough. It just goes to show to definitely not put all your eggs in one basket. If you were making your living on one Adwords search campaign and this happened, you’d have no bread money until it got fixed.
I do believe this was just one of the infamous Quality Score slaps, and it has something to do with my landing pages. I have some creative ideas on how to fix this issue so I don’t get slapped again, so I’ll be sharing them if they work out. My landing pages weren’t simple “bridge pages” with just a Continue button and no content, I had a lot of unique content, links, all that jazz. Kinda sucks though because I actually have to sit down and do some work, haha. I’ve been lazy though and busy with getting my house etc, so a good kick is what I needed.
Thank you Google.
