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Add me on SphinnIt 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.
March 5th, 2008 at 10:22 am
Wait, you mean Google can slap Super Affiliates too?
I wouldn’t doubt this is more of a software bug than an intentional slap.
It will probably magically fix it self soon.
-Eric
March 5th, 2008 at 10:23 am
Hi, thanks for quoting me Wes :)
This is indeed my biggest site! And with over a 100 pages of content, detailed reviews, product videos by far the best in my niche. I had a talk with my account team this afternoon and they are really serious about this. The system just doesn’t think affiliate sites are honest.
I will see what is happening over the next couple of days and will advise everybody not to go for the high bids by increasing your cpc. this is just wasting good money.
I’m waiting for Google to give me pointers on what to improve in order to avoid on what they call “the affiliate slap” lol
FYI This site had an ad spend of 16k a day over the last 18 months. So yes, the big guys get slapped too.
Good luck to you Wes
March 5th, 2008 at 10:32 am
My name isn’t Wes…
March 5th, 2008 at 10:44 am
Guess he dialed the wrong number…lol
March 5th, 2008 at 5:44 pm
Lol that’s a good way of putting it.
March 6th, 2008 at 3:07 am
Good God. $16k A day??
March 5th, 2008 at 10:46 am
btw…you link for “There’s a discussion going on about ” brings you back to this post and not to the wickedfire post.
March 5th, 2008 at 10:57 am
lol sorry, Paul :)
Mixed up the name from the interview. No wonder I got slapped ;)
March 5th, 2008 at 11:07 am
The link to the WF thread in your post is broken.
March 5th, 2008 at 11:25 am
Here’s the url to the thread:
http://www.wickedfire.com/traffic-supreme/24571-google-quality-score-update.html
March 5th, 2008 at 12:14 pm
WOW
I just checked my account and all my keywords are reading great well more then 50 percent of them before all them was ok
March 5th, 2008 at 12:45 pm
“For the Love of ALL that’s Holy…don’t get ALL your traffic from Google!!”
I have been slapped on big accounts enough to know that I should really only try and get 30-50% of my traffic from google (or less if possible) that way, when Google plays their Stupid Silly Games, you aren’t in the poor house with your campaigns.
Had my first $3,500+ Profit day yesterday on PPC! Up from like $100 a day a year ago…just keep moving forward..affiliate marketing is the best job I’ve ever had!
G
March 6th, 2008 at 6:18 am
Very impressive G! Congratulations!
March 5th, 2008 at 1:54 pm
When are you going to do an SEO project?
March 5th, 2008 at 2:04 pm
I found out today that the quality score system has been updated.
According to reports ‘Beginning in February 2008′ the new factor of ‘Landing Page Loading Time’ will affect your PPC quality score.
This is a brand new metric and has never been used when calculating the quality score before.
Google will be providing full transparency in the Adwords system of your ‘loading time grade’.
The load time will receive one of two grades. If it’s graded ‘This page loads slowly’, your landing page quality and Quality Score will be negatively affected.
This still doesn’t explain why you minimum bid has sky rocketed! But it might be something to bear in mind?
March 5th, 2008 at 2:29 pm
A bit of “slapage” over here. Doh.
I bet things will even out eventually.
March 5th, 2008 at 3:02 pm
That’s weird… I wasn’t affected. Hmmm… *crosses fingers*
March 5th, 2008 at 3:15 pm
Only had one campaign effected. Bad part is that I have a lot of these shitty bridge pages and only one gets slapped. Incredible Google, maybe with the automatic broad matching coming we can all be relevant *yawn*
March 7th, 2008 at 9:27 am
Hahah, touché!
March 5th, 2008 at 3:58 pm
[...] UberAffiliate reported that he has been hit by the Google Slap….in his Adwords Advertiser account. What this means is the $0.02-$0.10 per click minimum has suddenly been increased to $5.00 and $10.00 minimum bids. This usually effects a domain and sometimes an entire advertiser account. ShoeMoney has talked about this before as well. Apparently many many affiliate marketers using Google Adwords have been slapped whether they have one page doorway sites or huge content sites. There is a discussion about this at Wickedfire but you have to register to see it. [...]
March 5th, 2008 at 4:16 pm
Do as the WF thread says and call deStones. He can fix anything.
March 5th, 2008 at 5:15 pm
It’s funny to see how G threads an audience (I mean affiliates) that brought their system so much money and success during the last years.
Affiliates were good to pimp G’s revenue for some stock market reports. Now that they made enough publicity with it, which results in more “direct” advertisers, they slowly but steadily kick affiliates ass out of the system.
Why? Because every cent an advertiser spends for affiliate commissions, is a cent that they could spend for adwords.
March 6th, 2008 at 12:17 am
“Why? Because every cent an advertiser spends for affiliate commissions, is a cent that they could spend for adwords.”
I agree, this is more then anything else. And to be honest it’s with good reason. From a business perspective this is what they should do. So in oppose to some comments below; this is exactly what their shareholders want them to do!
From a moral perspective I totally disagree with Google’s vission. It is true that affiliates have been bringing them a lot of business and a lot of them play by the rules and try to add value to the pages, instead of the corporate advertisers with their standard signup pages.
But Google just wants those cent’s per click that is your profit..
March 6th, 2008 at 1:23 am
“this is exactly what their shareholders want them to do!”
I think that less than 20% of Gs stockholder at all know what “Affiliate Marketing” is and how it works. And if they would know that G throws away billions of dollar in revenue (which IS in my opinion what stockholders want), I bet most of them won’t be happy about.
March 6th, 2008 at 8:12 pm
Totally agree. Same reason they dislike paid links. It’s a funny coincidence, because I was just telling this to Jim Hedger in an interview we did at SMX West for Webmaster Radio. Most people have a search budget, or an internet marketing budget. You can spend for the organic traffic or the Adwords, but somewhere there’s gonna be a limit.
The flip side to argue is that people reinvest, the way Paul has and the other super affs in this discussion…
March 5th, 2008 at 8:01 pm
I think that their profits are going to keep falling because of stuff like this, then they will have some pissed off stockholders.
March 6th, 2008 at 12:59 am
Wow - Not good news for anyone, wonder why google have brain explosions like this sometimes, its not good for business. Advertisers are Google’s clients and need to be treated with respect.
March 6th, 2008 at 1:12 am
Paul, keep us updated on whether you get it resolved easily or if you have to make big changes to your sites.
March 6th, 2008 at 3:05 am
Those things always happen when everything goes smoothly and unfortunately cost too much time to correct!
March 6th, 2008 at 8:00 am
Google slaps happen its a part of being an affiliate marketter unfortunately!!!!!
March 6th, 2008 at 12:52 pm
They’re doing this to protect their future revenue. Most people don’t get that part. If they allow crap to show after a users clicks an ad, eventually users won’t click as many ads because they’ll know that last time they did, they ended up on a useless page. So they have to continue forcing affiliates to offer something of value to make the site appear as if it’s a legit site and not a shitty ebook sales page, (which they’re thankfully targeting in this slap..)
If surfers stop clicking ads because they start realizing they are ads, then not only does their profits suffer but your own affiliate business will suffer too.
If affiliates would stop cranking out shitty sites, they wouldn’t need to do these “slaps”. Btw next round is March 8th.
March 7th, 2008 at 12:57 am
What do you mean exactly with Next Round is March 8th ?
March 6th, 2008 at 3:29 pm
Some of my campaigns got a “hidden” slap or something…
They have OK or even great quality scores and yet get 1/20th the impressions. Lame… I’ll get it back up though.
March 6th, 2008 at 3:54 pm
Yah, I didn’t read all the comments on here, but one of my sites with over 13,000+ Indexed pages got slapped as well. However, I was able to talk with Google and they simply made an internal error. Now I’m not sure if that internal error occurred across multiple accounts, but it worked out great for me. good thing, because I am planning to sell one of my sites pretty soon and move onto affiliate marketing ;)
-David
March 6th, 2008 at 8:09 pm
Congrats on getting your own place Paul!
Besides that, I’ve been starting PPC for affiliate campaigns - largely inspired by you, as well as by my friend XMCP (slightlyshadyseo.com) and new friendly acquaintance Harrison Gevirtz. And the first stuff sucked as far as QS, but I’ve recently found some techniques to improve my QS by making smaller adgroups and writing more kw-focused copy.
March 6th, 2008 at 10:30 pm
Not only a reason not to put all your PPC eggs into one Google basket- but also a reason not to put all your eggs in the PPC basket to begin with. I am glad I have a couple hundred sites with sufficient natural traffic from multiple search engines and other places.
March 6th, 2008 at 11:50 pm
We can cry all we want, is there a solution yet?
Who the hell is destones?
March 7th, 2008 at 11:26 am
deStone is some guy who supposesly makes 30k a day and everyone is saying that he knows the “secret” to overcome the latest google slap. Not that i know or anything but it could all be a bunch of bullshit…
March 8th, 2008 at 2:02 pm
Does Google ever do the opposite and mistakenly start sending boatloads of traffic to someone instead of just pissing people off lately?
March 18th, 2008 at 6:40 am
Quote -
“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.”
I guess nothing has worked out?
March 18th, 2008 at 8:48 pm
I’ve been slapped too but I discovered a new source of traffic. I advertize on Megaglobe and for the record, I wasn’t able to get un-slapped!
G sucks.
March 21st, 2008 at 3:47 am
I have a French website and my campains have been slaped Too !
G sucks :p
Morgan, Is Megaglobe displaying GG adds ? is there enough traffic to replace or compensate GG ?
March 26th, 2008 at 10:14 pm
Megaglobe isn’t displaying GG ads, they displays their own ads “Megaglobe ads”. I don’t know about their traffic from France but I use them for my site (I live in the US) and I am satisfied.
To replace Google, you might want to combine Yahoo + Megaglobe . That’s your best bet.