Hello,
I've been using Adwords for two years now,
I'm using it to try and promote my affiliate marketing websites,
I've created a variety of campaigns for several products,
when I started, in the first year or so, it went pretty good, I've managed to get traffic at descent rates.

But for the last year or so, something happened, adwords turned hundreds of my keywords into an "inactive" status, since they request enormous amounts per clicks - between $1 per click, to $5 and even $10, which is absolutely ridiculous.

I've contacted adwords support several times, basically what I understood from them is that maybe If I'll change my ad text it would work, but that was useless, as most of my keywords are already optimized, some of them are four words phrases that are very specific, and still I'm required to bid these enormous amounts.

I've now opened a new adwords account, hoping maybe that would help, meanwhile I've copied one of my adgroups to my new account and paused it on the older one, and It's still requesting the same high bids....

I'm very frustrated with this situation, and google adwords support are plain useless about this.... can anyone help me understand what's going on and what can be done??

Thanks!

Google looks at your landing pages now to see how relevant they are to the ad. They've also been trying to make it more difficult for affialte sites to participate.

Ok, I've made a little experiment:
I've opened two identical adgroups under the same campagin, for the same product - on the first one, I've had it to lead to a page on my website, that has the same content as the original page that sells the product with the affiliate link, only that I deleted all links from the page, so I only had the text (whiche is relevant I guess ) and that's it.

Adwords kept asking me for $1 - $5 per click.

on the second adgroup, I've linked it to a page on a website that is not mine, a page that is ranked #1 on google in the regular search, for this search phrase.

Adwords asked me for only $0.03 as min Bid.

So what conclusions can I draw?

A. I'm still asked for high bids since my domain is blacklisted for being affiliate oriented and I should create a new one, and it would be worth the time.

B. I'm asked for low bids on the other site, not because its not an affiliate website (it sells the product independently) but because it's already doing great on the regular goolge search, and if I'll create a new domain I'll still won't be able to change anything since it wouldn't do as well on google (Even if I don't put any affiliate links)
but then what's the logic with adsense, if your'e paying them to appear on a certain search term because your'e not doing good for it on the regular search?

I saw this post now as I just joined.

If you still need help/opinion on this, post again and I may give you some pointers.

Pravir

Hi!
Yes I would appreciate your help, Thanks!

Geeze, careers, somehow I just find your words so familiar, lol

Shamrock,

Its really simple.... with the recent changes, Google makes it extremely difficult to direct-link to merchant pages, more often then not asking for prohibitive bid prices. If you are direct-linking.... forget about it.

From yur post, it seems you are sending traffic to your own website/landing page.

If this is persistently happening... I'm afraid you'll have to get another "relevant" domain name... Google puts a lot of importance now to the domain name to decide about relevancy. So if you are promoting, say, dog-training products... go get a domain like www.dog-training.com or some such relevant domain name.
Then start slowly.... get a campaign going with just a couple of adgroups going having very closely-knit kws and make sure those kws are used on your LP with a keyword density of around 5%. Make different LPs for different adgroups and this experience of yours shall be a thing of the past!!

Pravir

P.S. I don't think its difficult to advertise on Google Adwords as an affiliate - I do it all the time and sometimes have CPC lower than 10 cents - don't worry, you'll be able to do it with a little patience!

Originally Posted by pjayaswal

If this is persistently happening... I'm afraid you'll have to get another "relevant" domain name... Google puts a lot of importance now to the domain name to decide about relevancy. So if you are promoting, say, dog-training products... go get a domain like www.dog-training.com or some such relevant domain name.

I'm not sure I agree with this, the main factor with the landing page is the page's content rather than the domain name, if you move everything over to a newly created domain instead I think you'll end up with more problems than you started with.

I'd suggest making your ad text as relevant as possible and cleaning up yourlanding pages to subtly promote affiliates rather than making it look like the sole purpose of your advertising campaign.

If there were a lot of bidding for your keywords then your keyword CPC will go up. Sounds like your market is getting competitive and thus the cost is going up.

Mike

Do your landing pages text match your adwords ads? What about incoming links anchor text to those landing pages?

Try optimizing your web page