Just when you think you have all the inner workings of Adwords and quality score down cold, they go and surprise you. None of us are immune from the apparent wrath of the Google slap, as I found out with one of my most solid campaigns. This particular group of campaigns was structured really well, good CTR, optimized ads, relevant landing pages – all the stuff you are supposed to do. Google let it run for 7 months and I thought we had a happy relationship going, but then 3 days ago – boom, $10 bids for everything. I have contacted Adwords, and am still waiting for a response. (perhaps this campaign is also too targeted?) I just kind of find it sad that Google would let something run so long, and take so much of my money, then basically tell me to get lost. It makes me long for the old days of brick and mortar business where you actually had a relationship with suppliers and vendors, and business had thing called loyalty to their customers. Of course my measly $75k is nothing to big G, and wouldn’t even register a blip on their radar. Oh well, just more to spend with Yahoo and MSN.
This will be the start of a new series of posts as I try to recover the campaign from the smackdown. It should be interesting for both reader and author 
Hey Chad,
I’m new to your blog. Someone I know recommended it. I added your blog to my igoogle reader. I’ll be reading it regularly.
As for the google slap, did you mean you lost $75000 before realizing you were paying $10 per click? Also, i read your post google saying you campaign is too targeted. Its seems they want you to bid and pay more for the general keywords than targeted keywords.
I look forward to the days when I’m spending $75k on a campaign
ouch… being slapped with $10 minimum bids is just ridiculous. Hopefully it’s just an algo hiccup and they will set you right back to where you where. Sadly though, you are likely right about the accounts being “too targeted” and this is in-line with things I have seen and experienced as well with Google… just not to this extreme.
Really looking forward to hearing the progress of this.
Keep up the good fight, I am sure that the $75K will be well spent elsewhere if Google stands by their new minimum bids.
-r-
You are very positive considering the gravity of this Google slap on your account!
Do you have any indication at all as to why this might have happened?
So did any of this traffic convert? $75K is nothing to write off if you ask me.
That last sentence didn’t come out right. I guess what I meant is its not something to just pass off as “Oh well better luck next time”.
Gagan and Jason – This traffic was converting for a nice profit, so I didn’t lose any of the $75k spent. The only loss now is future revenue if I can’t get the campaign back up.
Joshua – It’s part of life in PPC marketing, I can’t get too upset.
I got slapped this same way on a campaign I was spending $2,000 per day on in mid-December. I have my own personal Google account reps and called them frantic for a solution as all traffic had been paused to my campaign…
I heard nothing from my account reps for almost two weeks (luckily I had the inspiration to just transfer my campaign into a new account and onto a new relevant URL).
My traffic came back better than before and within a week I was spending almost $2.5K per day on ad spend for this well converting campaign!
Eventually my stupid google rep got back with me and fed me their generic “it was your landing page quality issue” bullshit…which quite honestly, was bullshit, because my landing pages were very relevant and the content, etc was there.
Lessons learned:
#1: If you have a google account rep and they offer to let their team of ‘experts’ optimize your account for you, tell them to #(@ off and leave their dirty little mitts off your account.
#2: Always have a backup URL on hold and ready to go for your most valuable campaigns, so that in the event google decides to cancel all traffic to your account (just for the hell of it), you can immediately transfer everything to a new account and new URL and try to recover from Google’s silliness
#3: You should really try and not let any one network account for more that 20% of your search or PPC traffic, that way if they screw you, you still have the 80% of traffic to fall back on (easier said than done I know).
Anyway, just my rant on Google…I really hope Microsoft & Yahoo combine to offer a little competition to the Great Satan (google).
Wow. Definitely let us know how it works out.
even the best laid plans at times get a wrench thrown in them … I have been hit before but honestly sometimes it isn’t google it is company backing off on spend or pulling an offer or getting slapped by google yes it sucks but it does happen which is why you have to make the money while u can
.
Greg, great comment with some really good tips.
Google just does not like landing pages in any format anymore, it’s as simple as that. When I first got slapped, I tried desperately to try and meet their requirements of building the landing page into a mini-site. They are totally not helpful whatsoever. Your campaign goes down and there’s a ‘we don’t care’ attitude. I added contact pages, terms pages, info pages, and my quality score always stayed poor. Once you get hit you’re screwed unless you move to another domain name (but you can’t do that all the time).
All of my campaigns were targeted with keywords in the ad being the title and h1 tags and were included as text in the page. It wasn’t like I was lying or anything. But the fact that the page was set up to transfer people to the actual source and I was just the intermediary (even though I had unique content), screwed me over.
It’s amazing that Google has that much money that it can just brush advertisers aside. I was spending money with them as an advertiser and there was absolutely no desire to help me or even explain why my account was basically stopped cold. Usually companies want to keep their advertisers happy!
Anyways, I stopped using AdWords because I got tired spending time setting up campaigns and then finding out my bids were $12 each. Again, I understand if the page has nothing to do with the ad. That makes total sense. But when the keywords, ad, and web page all gel, there shouldn’t be problems like this.
So now what are we all to do? I use Yahoo but it’s just a drop in the bucket compared to Google…
Unfortunately, this is one of the things we have to deal with.
I will agree however that for the amount of money I spend at Google, Yahoo, and MSN I sure do not get treated like an appreciated customer.
What sucks even worse, and I hate to say it is…Yahoo is just as bad as Google. I have encountered many BIG flukes and errors occurring on their end, and if I wouldn’t have caught it and brought it to their attention it would have never been recognized.
This is one thing that makes us unique from others, when something like this google slap occurs, we are quick to adapt.
Its because if this kind of issues we need a real competitor to Google, when they slap us we slap back by going else where
Astonishing amount of money, but this is the way Google works. Fortunately you didn’t actually lost $75,000
[...] account managers and friends. Thankfully, this one totally missed me! I have been hit hard by other Google slaps in the past, but I guess the Google karma was good for me this time around. I have been hearing [...]
Wow nasty, didn’t you get an account rep when spending that kind of money?
Hey Guys,
I know in depth about the slap and how to make your site not get slapped by Google. I am not tricking Google I will tell you exactly what to do to get back on.
I offer a full money back guarantee if I don’t get you back on Google.
Here is more info:
http://silverscopepromotion.com/google-slap.shtml
-Chris