I have long suspected that Google may be using their analytics for more than we know. Ever since watching Matt Cutts pull up every domain a guy at Pubcon had ever registered, live in front of an audience, I have been worried. Call me paranoid, but I just have to wonder what information they are gathering and compiling into some huge database by all of us happily placing their tracking code on our sites.
Now this may or may not be a coincidence, but something very funny happened with a new site I had launched recently. This site was created to send leads to an affiliate offer. It’s more than just a landing page, but that’s the general idea of the site. I was running an Adwords campaign with some good results. All my bids were in the range I wanted, all keywords active. Then I installed Google Analytics tracking code on all the pages. Within 3 hours of doing that, ALL my bids for every keyword in the campaign went to $10 and switched to inactive. Now this seems like quite a coincidence like I said before. Is Google using analytics to determine landing page quality and relavancy?
You be the judge.
I stopped running Analytics months ago (along with ANY of the SE’s in-house conversion tracking tools). I am sorely missing Analytics though.
Imagine what Google can potentially do with all that tracking data, or when they find out you’re making $50/lead and only spending 0.15c/click…
Regarding that $10 bid thing though… there’s a good chance your landing page got handjobbed (their quality score bot still seems to be pretty primitive). Nothing you can do about that other than the obvious.
Wow, I never thought of this before. That would be pretty evil of the big G.
Very intersting… although, I’ve never had any issues. At this point I think I’m too addicted to Google Analytics to stop
I know this article is old, but I had exact same problem with Google Analytics just a couple of weeks ago. I was running Adwords very successfully for a week; all my keywords bids were active. I installed Google Analytics, and overnight even a single keyword was active. The morons who keep repeating the “Big G”, or may be they are no morons but on the payroll of Big G, don’t understand or don’t want you to know that Google is far more evil than Microsoft ever was. Keep using Google Analytics, and we’ll see how Google will screw every single one of us as they get more and more monopoly. Keep offering them your private data, and make them billions while the rest of us get nothing.