What is happening with Adwords pricing???

[wevet]

For the last 5 years my average ppc on adwords has averaged around 35p per click.

During the latter part of last month I saw a jump in cost on some days an average £1.25ppc.

Yesterday some words which avaraged 30-35pppc have shot up and on some campaigns i am being charged £2.40+ per click.

I have detected no new competition in my sector.

Obviously one cannot speak to anyone at Google about this.

Anyone any ideas?

 

[fisicx]

It’s probably Google reassessing the value of the keywords and deciding they are worth more.

It’s in the adwords T&C that they can do this.

 

[Nochexman]

Google have been making changes lately and you might unwittingly have enabled them to do this. They talked to me recently about changing my bidding strategy (it is a new tool). Take a look at Settings (second column on the left hand side, about half way down) then Bid Strategy Type.

 

[wevet]

As nochexman suggested it was my fault. I followed Google's "advidce" and allowed them to play withthe cpc about 3 months ago. Nothing much changed until the last 3 weeks. So we have had Brexit I have had my GoogXit. I have gone back to manual bidding the difference is stark:

5th August
Impressions 2535 clicks 102 cost £90.79

6th August have changed back to manual bidding:

impressions 9102 Clicks 125 cost £54

The nitty gritty business booked on the 6th was 40% up on the 5th.

The Google emantra of "do no evil" obviously does not extend to it's customer bank accounts!

 

[Nochexman]

My take is slightly different. We're getting fewer clicks, and paying more for them, but the number of conversions (sales) has gone up - which is what we are most interested in.

wevet - would be interested to know if your fewer clicks are translating into more sales?

 

[wevet]

Higher bills and NO effect on the conversion rate.

 

[Talay]

I bought a business which had automated Adwords spending £2/3k a month which was stable for about 9 months but then it went off a cliff. Google would burn the monthly fee (daily x 30) and nothing we could do with our knowledge level could bring it back.

We ended up outsourcing it to a company and completely overhauling the Adwords campaign.

We now have far more accurate data, have reduced some wastage but are spending around £10k per year on getting it managed.

It is a long haul but we can't do it ourselves as the constant knowledge refresh would burn our time.

 

[Graham Tyers]

Google will have "upgraded" your account to "maximise" clicks/conversions/google share value.

They're gits and they don't give a stuff about anything other than Google profits. If you don't control your account to work in your favour, they will take your budget for themselves and gift you dross in return.

It still has value but you have to be prepared to work for it by VERY careful application of keywords, negative keywords and customer targeting.

Whatever google suggests, do the complete opposite.