Posts from ‘March, 2008’

I’m taking a hiatus from posting about Adwords and Google Slaps for a bit. I am still very much involved with running Adwords campaigns for various offers and have even started doing a little SEM consulting. So Adwords PPC is still very much at the core of what I do online.

However, so as not to have all my eggs in the same proverbial basket, I also need to get back to what got me here in the first place, which is article marketing and organic traffic generation methods.

I promise this will be the last post I make for a while regarding Google Slaps. However, I do want to summarize a few observations now that the dust has settled somewhat. Who knows, not that any of this is solid evidence of anything, but sometimes you can glean a bit about how the internals of a black box work by observing the effects of external stimulii on the behavior of the black box.

Since there really appears to be little consistency in how Google Slaps are administered, especially this last one, my theory (gut feeling) is that Google goes through these events to periodically clean out their advertising inventory.

Since we really have no way of truly knowing what Google wants with regard to their Adwords Quality Score, perhaps instead, we should find ways to make lemonade from the lemons Google has turned many of our campaigns into. What I’m proposing is pure opportunism, but that seems to be what a lot of online businesses are resorting to these days.

The latest Google Slap seems to be particularly bizarre in both the way it played out as well as what it has left in its wake. Granted, Google Slaps are nerve wracking events any way you slice them, but this one is giving me chills.

“And castles made of sand,
slip into the sea, …eventually”

Jimi Hendrix – “Castles Made of Sand”; Axis Bold As Love

Yesterday, sometime in the afternoon my time (EST), Google started going to work on my Adwords campaigns on the Search Network. It clearly was a “Google Slap” in action, but this time around it seemed to be acting a little differently.

At first, it was only a few ad groups in one campaign and then only certain keywords. While some keywords were getting hit with the usual $5 and $10 minimum bids, which are typical of a Slap, others were hanging on at .05 with “Great” Quality Scores.