[...] hopefully Google won't notice it :)
Notice what? ;)
AWA
Enjoy it while it lasts...
Israel
When I started with Adwords some years back, I knew little. Yet I could predict conversions and success with amazing accuracy. I could sell the proverbial "ice to Eskimos" and be assured 100% profits. Yeah, I made some mistakes but learned quick!
Disabled keywords generally meant they stunk, and I quickly dumped them -- worked for me. Even though at the time, the "Disableds" were a frustration for many advertisers.
******
Fast forward a few years and while I know a lot more, Adwords continously confounds me. The 100% profit is now hard to achieve, to put it mildly.
I do have one promising campaign that still "pays the rent" untouched. I rarely tinker with it out of fear...
I know it has even greater potential if I dare to experiment, so experiment I did.
On Monday, I added an Adgroup for it with a few clever keywords that I hadn't thought of before. I gave what I've learned over time a reasonable 50 cent USD bid.
Sure enough, one single click on a keyword and a sale the first day. 100% conversion rate. Only impression too, so 100% CTR!
Conversion Tracking turned on for this campaign, but no Google checkout, so Google doesn't know what I made from the sale.
******
My other campaigns which get far more traffic don't generally use Conversion Tracking, so the big picture makes me appear to be a dismal failure if one looks at my overall "conversion rate". ;)
Though intermingled among my other campaigns are rare links to the same products that use "Conversion Tracking". I only have a link to those products on pages where it's appropriate, so the Conversion Rate looks really terrible since those sales are far rarer.
Hard for an outsider to "analyze" what I'm up to, though I'm completely "white hat".
*****
After I made the sale in my best campaign, Google had made this keyword "Inactive" with a $5.00 USD mininum bid!
Now the keyword has had a 2nd click (cool by me, don't expect 100% conversion rates to be the norm!).
The $5.00 minimum bid is gone, Google is happy with 50 cents again, even though the CTR (and Conversion Rate) is only 50% instead of the 100% (confused?)
How does Adwords work? Anyone have a guess anymore?
Israel
AWA. Mind explaining what is going on?
To be very straightforward about it, my previous (tongue in cheek) response was made when I had seen two people reporting on something, about which I have heard nothing at all elsewhere. And now I see four, in a thread that has been near the top of the page for a while.
At this point, I chalk it up to the quality-based bidding system at work. I am not aware of anything else behind it.
If I see more 'reports' of this over the next day or so, though, I'll certainly start looking into it.
AWA
We saw a lot of changes in quite a few clients accounts, so we got testing. After 5 different accounts were looked at, we changed landing pages and ad copy and not only saw the min bids drop by over 75%, we saw the actual cpc drop by 66% across all accounts.
It's all about quality scoring now. Account History, Keyword, Ad & Landing Page. We think we have a found a nice formula to kep working from to improve it more.
Hint: You may need to multiply the number of landing pages & AdGroups you have by 10 or more to get the desired results.
I think it might be that some websites where reevaluated for some reason and got better quality score, and it is not a change in the algo itself.
