I have to say Google never ceases to amaze me. Today I was reverse Google slapped!! What does this mean? I had several campaigns that were slapped down to 0 impressions, poor quality score and generally dead campaigns. I had long since moved on to different domains/accounts with the campaigns, but just left the dead campaigns as “active”. Well, much to my surprise today when checking stats on some affiliate campaigns I had huge numbers. Checking the sub IDs I found the traffic was coming from very strange old subs ids. It turns out after 6 months Google now likes those old campaigns and changed the quality score to great. This automatically switched everything back on and charged up huge amounts of clicks. Keep in mind I did nothing whatsoever to these campaigns to bring them back.
Perhaps this is a new technique, just let your slapped campaigns sit there and age, like a fine wine, then eventually Google will decide they like you again!
The only problem is, since I wasn’t using those landing pages or domains nothing was optimized and conversion rates were terrible. But nothing that can’t be fixed quickly so I can capitalize on my new surge of traffic.
Till then, Jean
This is very interesting since I always thought the general consensus was that once a campaign got slapped the best thing to do was to immediately delete it. I had the notion that leaving a campaign up that had a crappy quality score and/or had been slapped brought down the credibility and history of that whole google account.
After I read this post, I logged into my account to see to see the same thing. 1 of my campaigns is displaying ads again and minimum bids have gone back down to $.05
They were probably just testing something out last week, or the reverse slap is just a glitch, and we’ll get slapped even harder soon.
I also had this occur on some campaigns, I just don’t know what G is doing.. *L*
It also happened to me…. But now its over… The QS is back to normal. I guess it was a glitch of some kind.
Mine are still on and holding steady this morning!
I soo wish that would happen to me. I spent all day yesterday re-optimizing my campaigns from the recent slap. Everything was fine yesterday. Google let me get 25 clicks, then shut me down with their stinking $10.00 bid notice. I HATE GOOGLE! It’s sad that the people (ligitimate advertisers) who pay Google for their service have to be run over all the time.
I’m concentrating more and more on Article marketing - and also moving toward Yahoo! Ads. I just don’t have a day to spend every month getting un-slapped, only to get hit again the next day!
Sorry, just had to vent somewhere - I’m glad your campaigns came back, maybe I’ll just keep waiting. . .
[...] read an interesting post over at CDF Networks and I just had to share it with [...]
The age of a campaign can certainly give a bit of a boost. I’ve seen neglected campaigns pick up speed and begin generating decent amount of clicks with really low CPCs before in the past.
My ASSUMPTION is that some of the same principles of the algorithm that Google applies to their organic listings that takes a domain names age into account are also applied to the PPC algorithms. Keep in mind however that any benefit (and long term ROI) that age might play on a neglected campaign is far out-weighed by effective optimization on a regular basis.
Another reason that a campaign may suddenly spring back to life is due to changes in the competitor landscape, which also plays a roll. As the competitive landscape changes so does the aggregate quality score of that group of advertisers and thus so does where your QS falls on the bell curve of the aggregate QS rating of all advertisers for a given term.
In other words, a 7 on the sexy scale isn’t going to get as much notice hanging around a bunch of 9s and 10s but put that 7 with a bunch of 5s and 4s and they’re the belle of the ball.
Great comment roibert, that is pretty much what I assumed has happened.
That’s funny! I should unpause some old campaigns and wait for the money to roll in! (Who knows what could happen, maybe I’ll get lucky…)
That is great. I wonder what change in the algorithms.
HMMMMM, i guess i gotta let my friends know about this on time so that they can take actions immediately
Chad,
Just for grins, something else you might want to look into is the organic rankings of those pages (or the domain itself) to see if they have increased in position lately.
There is a theory that a page or site that has good organic rankings will give a boost to the QS of landing pages going to the same domain name because the domain is seen as a more “trusted” domain due to it’s higher ranking organically, much in the same way that the organic algorithm looks at domains that have quality links pointing to them so does the PPC algorithm and what is a more trusted link than a high position in the Google SERPS?
However, a Google rep at SMX denies that this is possible since neither algorithm (organic or PPC) interacts with the other and thus has no influence over the other. Unfortunately I don’t remember the direct link to his qoute but if I come across it again, I’ll gladly post it.
All that being said, it would be interesting to hear if your organic listings have stepped up the ladder as well.
Cheers.
i told my friends about it and they were amazed. they dont belive it anyway
i told my friends about it and they were amazed. they dont belive it anyway
I think one of the biggest things to do when there is a slap, is to stay calm.
First, if one or more of your campaigns has been negatively affected, contact your account manager, and see what happened. If he can’t provide a good answer, ask to speak to someone else.
It’s important to remember that you are a customer of Google (or Yahoo or MSN…) Although they may do anything they want on the search side, since it’s a free service, PPC is another thing. The least they can do is provide and explanation and some help. After all, offering a service, and changing how the service works all the time, without disclosing how the service has changed to their customers, is not a “good business model”.
Think of eBay. Although changes to their terms and services are not always welcome, at least they are come forward early about the changes.