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It’s been a while since I posted about anything to do with Google Slaps. I’m sure anyone that does anything at all with Adwords has grown pretty weary of the whole thing and just numbly accepts it as inevitable. However, I think now is a good time to revisit this most unpleasant of topics and see if anything has changed in Google’s position and more importantly, to see if there are any lessons to be learned.

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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.

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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.

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“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.

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During the Prohibition Era in America when alcohol was illegal, there were underground nightclubs and watering holes referred to as “speakeasys“. Old newsreel footage from the period would show well-dressed men and women knocking on a door in a seedy back alley that had a special peep hole built in to it. A pair of menacing looking eyes would then peer back from behind the sliding peep hole to check out the visitors. Once it had been determined that they were not police or other undesirables, the door would swing open to reveal a wild party raging on the other side.

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