IMMania.com

Anyone who has done any advertising with Google Adwords has probably, at some point, experienced the frustration at seeing most of your keywords slapped with minimum bids of $10. This can happen right off the bat when setting up a new campaign or can happen after a campaign has been running for quite some time.

This little phenomenon has been become known as the “Google Slap“.

No one seems to be immune from the Slap. Both Adwords newbies as well as the most experienced of marketers have felt its sting.

Google made it official back in July of 2006 that the quality of the advertisements displayed on the right hand side of their SERPs mattered just as much as the organic results on the left hand side of the page. It all comes down to providing a great experience for searchers is what they claimed.

My intent in the post is not to debate the fairness of the Google Adwords system. At the end of the day, Google is going to do whatever they damn well please We can protest that our campaigns are being unfairly penalized, but that’s really not going to get us anywhere.

I have an affiliate site that has some content, but primarily consists of affiliate links and some banners. I have a lot of pages that have product description forms I got from Commission Junction. I’ve added a keyword-focused paragraph or two at the top of the pages, but nothing substantial. As recently as 6 months ago I was using these pages as landing pages for seasonal campaigns I was running on Adwords. The keywords in this niche are a little bit more expensive, but nothing too bad - about 0.20 - .30 CPC to get on the first page of results.

I had two campaigns that did pretty well - average commission of $20 and a 4% CR.

However, this all came to a screeching halt earlier this year when Google decided to slap all my campaigns for this site. No matter what I did to the pages or which page I used, my min bids were all set at $10. I emailed Adwords support and asked for a campaign review.

While I was waiting for a reply, I also placed a call to Adwords Support. I got a first-line support rep and she pretty much repeated the usual party line about LP quality and the number of searches a keywords gets, yada, yada, yada. However, she did agree to have a specialist review my campaigns.

In the meantime, I received a reply to my email inquiry and was told that the quality of my pages was fine and that the high bids were a result of few searches for the keywords in my adgroups. Well, I knew this couldn’t be the case since I had been getting quite a few impressions as well as clicks for these keywords.

Later on, I received an email reply from the account rep I had spoken with on the phone. It looked like a form letter and pretty much stated that my pages were of “very poor quality” and that was the reason for the high minimum bids. This is more along the lines of what I was expecting to hear. The message also went on to state  that perhaps the Adwords program was not the best advertising choice for my site.

Well! I must say, I have never been so insulted….

Nah, I got over it pretty quickly. It was clear that once ‘G’ slaps a domain, you can pretty much forget about ever reviving it for use with Adwords again. Just cut your losses and migrate your pages to a new domain and try your darndest to appease the great and almighty ‘G’ the next time around.

This is exactly what I’ve done. And not a moment too soon as we head into the make or break season of holiday sales. So far my Quality Scores are holding up at “Great”.

As for my old site, I’m getting a modest amount of referred traffic from some articles I posted a while back and rank highly in Yahoo! and MSN for a popular search phrase. Google seems to have even slapped me for organic search as well. My pages are indexed, but all are relegated to page 17 and beyond in their SERPS.

Google has made their point abundantly clear. And I’ve gotten the message.