I'm not sure how many adwords 'advertisers' there are in this forum, but they just released their new 'simplified' keywords system where they force you to increase the minimum cpc to outrageous levels and I can't see that it will benefit me all that much, it seems it could almost triple my advertising costs and that trippled cost won't translate into triple sales. For example a keywod that was perfomring quite well at .07 cpc now has to be increase to 1.00 cpc or it won't be active at all. And there is no competition for that would that I can see. When I do a search with the keyword in question, my ad was the only one that showed up with a avg. pos of 1.0, how could that keyword possibly be worth $1.00?

That is not the only example, most of my keywords had similar increases, its absolutely absurd!

Unfortunately they have a near-monopoly on the market and have advertisers by the %$*&@! This new system may open the door for other adversing mediums and other search engines to step up and gain importance. I hope someone uses this opportunity to do just that. Google is going to tick off a lot of their advertisers with this new system.

In order for me to maintain the same amount of clicks at the higher cpc i had to increase the campaign totals to almost 3 times what they were. This is just a way for google to make even more money, I guess they weren't happy with only a few million $'s a day!

I would be interested to hear others takes on this new system.

It seems as though Google is moving more and more to the Enterprise market. They don't want to deal with the small advertisers paying 10 cents, they want the large companies with $200,000/year budget.

We stopped using adWords a while ago, without a large budget, it's just not even worth it.

I wish I could stop using them but until my site acheives a decent SERP what other choice is there? If I stop so will my traffic, or at least drop WAY down. Talk about a rock and a hard place. They are the king of the search engines and the other alternatives are really pretty lame.

How did you get away with stopping using them? You must have decent organic SERP. Anybody know a viable, efrfective alternative to adwords? If so PLEASE let me know what it is. I'll switch in a heart beat.

What happened to do no evil?

Man I wanted to start using adwords too! I dont have 1.00 per click neither!

Originally Posted by Anacrusis

It seems as though Google is moving more and more to the Enterprise market. They don't want to deal with the small advertisers paying 10 cents, they want the large companies with $200,000/year budget.

which for me is an understandable course.

Originally Posted by Anacrusis

It seems as though Google is moving more and more to the Enterprise market. They don't want to deal with the small advertisers paying 10 cents, they want the large companies with $200,000/year budget.

We stopped using adWords a while ago, without a large budget, it's just not even worth it.

They are now concentratin on making happy the investors.

Originally Posted by shabbirbhimani

They are now concentratin on making happy the investors.

Bingo! I think that is exactly what they are concentrating on... stock price and more money for the investors. Too bad for the little guys, the people who made them what they are.

I see nobody's mentioned overture. It's the second big player, isn't it? It covers the Yahoo!, MSN, Wanadoo networks off the top of my head and a few more. I stopped using adwords a few weeks ago because it just wasn't converting. Shame.

Edit: It was converting, but not cost effectively!

I have had similar problems with highly competitive markets, but some of my customers have retained their low cost Adwords and are still paying $0.10 to $0.25 per click (They are advertising locally). The changes to Adwords didnt seem to make any difference. However, I have other sites that like you have become unusable if you dont want to pay mega bucks. I have someone who was happy to pay $20 per day, he cant even spend it now as he is unwilling to up his bids from $0.10 to $1.00 per click.