Since the recent Google Slap 3 in February this year I’ve noticed that minimum bid prices for new campaigns (i.e new domains) have increased. I would guess pretty much that this is due to the new algorithm where Google needs to gather sufficient data for its quality score before lowering the minimum bid. Direct linking just does not seem to work for me at all. I get huge min bid prices that seem to just keep on getting higher and higher. For example, I did a direct link just to test out the this new Clickbank product, my minimum bid started off at 0.20 and as time passed it just kept on increasing. My quality score was rated at OK but yet the min bid prices kept on hiking up to the point where I just couldn’t keep the campaign profitable.
Compare that scenario with my other new campaign in which I purchased a new domain & created a landing page right from the start. Reason I did that was because minimum bid prices for direct linking was something ridiculous like $5. With the optimized landing page I had a fairly high minimum bid at first (~0.30) but after I hit 100 clicks and a great CTR of ~10% my minimum bid prices dropped drastically to 0.06.
It seems that now more than ever Google advertisers like myself need to invest in a campaign before reaping the profits. In other words - lose money first, gain later when your min bid prices drop. As much as I’d love to gripe about Google’s shake up’s it does sieve out the Adwords newbies and leave the playing field to the more advanced players.
This new niche that I’m currently testing out had a load of advertisers but all of which have since disappeared after the recent slap. And how do I know this? As I was conducting my keyword research on Google’s keyword tool I noticed that the Google advertiser competition data was way high on almost all of the relevant keywords. However, I did a manual search on Google and there were not more than 4 advertisers. Its seems as though all these competitors have dropped out after recent massive increase in min bids. Now I’ve got this niche all to myself…..*grin*
Google Adwords is a gold mine if you only play by the rules and are willing to put in the necessary effort to reap the rewards!
March 10th, 2007 at 10:15 am
Hi Cheryl,
It’s good to see you new website (own hosted) here after told by my good friend Gobala that your wordpress hosted blog being closed down by Wordpress.com sudddenly in few months back.
Yeah, you are correct, we need to study the Google Adwords well before we can really benefits from this goldmine. Look forward to see more suggestion from you in this blog.
In fact, my little suggestion to you, start build your list instead of just driving traffic to the affiliate product page directly. Only with the good & targetted list, you can ensure your constant income from affiliate marketing.
My mistake in last year is I don’t really focus in building my list and the result you can predict obviously. However, this year I decided to build my list, in less than a month time, I can build a name list of 100+. This is not consider a very good result as I just start on the first month but I can see i will get better and better.