SEM Development

The AdWords announcement says the change will happen on July 1st, 2006 and will include a $0.25/1000 units charge.  There’s been plenty of speculation about whether this was going to happen but now we finally have an answer.

This was certainly the best thing for Google.  They gave four reasons for the change:

• Flexibility and scalability
• Commercialization
• Standardization
• Efficiency incentive

I have to say flexibility is the biggest win for me.  My quota has run out before and led to some major headaches.  I’ve run a few numbers and the quota charge will be around 0.5% to 1% of the total revenue for a campaign.  This is negligible but I’d still like to see it fall.  This could be accomplished two ways:

1. Work harder at reducing quota units used
2. Work harder on increasing revenue

I think everyone would be better served by me working on #2.

For the past two months I’ve seen that when I add new keywords to Google AdWords they will start with a min bid of $5. This, of course, disables all of the newly added keywords and, since it would be daft to increase the bid to $5, they stay disabled. This ridiculously high min bid usually drops after about two days.

I’m not the only one to have noticed this Google AdWords trickery. I’ve always assumed that it was a sneaky way to introduce an editorial review process. By jacking up prices, Google makes it nearly impossible to traffic these keywords therefore giving them time to review the content of the destination page or creative. I’ve seen some other reasonable explanations for this phenomenom as well. The AdWords API group has a thread discussing this problem as well but I disagree that the min bid drops after adding creative. It still stays at $5 for around two days.

Whatever the reason, I wish Google would be a bit clearer about this policy.