This penalization at Google's part can also be related to the post that I had put up last month about Google finally incorporating Landing Page load time as quality factor for Google AdWords quality scores.

Here are some interesting posts about this new situation, that has been developing between Webmasters and Google:

Ouch!

Suddenly 98% of thousands of key phrases are inactive - where they want to whack the bid up to 10 bucks!

Many of these terms are good converters, many have good CTR, many of them exactly match phrases on the landing pages.

Virtually all of these AdGroups are about a week old today.

Anyone else seeing this?

yes, this called quality score updated. you got slapped! Your landing page quality is not up to google standard or you are in business that they don't like.

I understand the basics about QS

High level question here - I need some specifics please.

Other than give it time and start doing some selective testing and modifications, what the HECK do I do?

How do I know this isn't some Google "flu" that will blow over in a few hours or days?

What would Netmeg do?

Loading time - no problems found

Keyword relevance - no problems found

Landing page - This page isn't highly relevant.
Based on the relevance of the associated keyword and ad text, page content, and page functionality.

$10 bids on everything.. domain toasted ..

Yup if 'Landing page' is not relevant, then it is TOAST.. Burnt Black.

I found on a majority of my words that got wacked, when you look at the score and it tells you what page it's scoring, it's not the page that the ad is supposed to be going to. Well no wonder the page is not relevent Google, your not showing the page I told you to that was relevant.

USA campaign: min bid $1.00

Landing page - This page isn't highly relevant.
Based on the relevance of the associated keyword and ad text, page content, and page functionality.

UK campaign: min bid .05c everything is great.

Same landing page, same ad copy, same display url, same keyword (only 1 keyword in the campaign.) different tracking codes in destination urls.

No it's not, they just tweaked the QS algorithm again. I still have lots of stuff running at .05 (although I did get slapped on some Yahoo minimum bids this morning, go figure)

What would netmeg do?

I'd take my most absolute gotta-have-em keywords, and split them out into new ad groups with that are very tightly focused to a theme. Even if it means creating 25 new ad groups with one keyword each.

Then I'd rewrite the **** out of my ads, making sure they were extremely in sync with both the keywords and the landing page. You don't want any keywords in the ad group that aren't somehow included in the ad and on the page.

Then I'd sit back for a week and see what happens.

Rinse. Repeat.

But that's just me.

Also - the way I understand it (but this has never been confirmed to me by Google) is that the amount of the minimum bid is at least in part determined by the *account* quality score. So if you're getting blasted with $10 minimums, then Google may not have a very warm and fuzzy feeling about your account and/or your business model. The lowest minimum bid for a POOR quality score is $.40, and that's for an account in pretty good standing.

Like I said, this was never confirmed to me, but I've had boatloads of conversations with other AdWords users, with both more and less experience than I have, and my own observations as well.

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