I guess I shouldn’t be saying this, because for us it’s been a good thing overall. But after sitting on the sidelines reading this blog for the past 2 weeks I guess I finally broke .

It’s a philosphy I strongly believe in- when life throws you a curve ball, it’s your job to adjust and not bitch and moan about the changes you need to make. In the end this will only continue to root out those who don’t want to make the effort, leaving more for us who continue to push forward.

That’s my 2 cents…

Matt

Just wait until Google’s next quarterly stock report. When news gets out that revenues are way down, you will see Google stock go through the floor in a matter of hours.

They will then surely understand who their real customers are.

I would consider buying Yahoo and MSN stock shortly before the Q3 Google report is due to come out.

I have a one page site that promotes affiliate products, just a soft sell endorsement linked directly to the products page. 98% of the traffic was google adwords.

I used to pay 5-10 cents a click and then the price started rising to over 50 cents a click, even on words with minimal competition. Eventualy I had to drop my most profitable campaigns.

One of my most profitable sites is kicked to curb waiting. It still makes a slight profit so I haven’t killed it.

It sucks to be at the mercy of such a giant like google. I have since dropped all my google adwords campaigns.

I believe that google is trying to clean out their system now that they are publicly traded and found a way to do it and make huge pofits. How much did each of us pay to try to hang on to those profitable keywords? And how much are you paying now?

I, as everyone else here has been bitten by the Google bug. How sad. I don’t understand how Google and other online services such as EBay and PayPal have forgotten who got them where they are today. The small business owner. Whether working from home, garage, basement or a real office, it was us, the small entrepeneurs that built Google, EBay and PayPal. Not the big companies who now dominate Google with their $15 per click and Million dollar advertising budgets. It is very unfair of Google to constantly change their metrics and not really tell us about it first. Oh sure, they say, “Oh, starting on the next Wednesday after the next full moon, we are going to do this or that.” What they don’t tell you, are things like the fact that your landing page will now be used to judge how much you should pay. Who are they to judge my landing page? After all, my customers have been buyin g from me for years with google traffic costing only .05 and .10 cents per click. Now, Google wants what? $5, $10 even $15 per click? No my friend, it had nothing to do with your webpage or landing page. It is because some other bastard was dumb enough to pay $14.95 a click to get your spot. So what, he can afford it. But hey, We can’t! And now, this mess is putting people out of business and they can’t feed their families anymore. Thanks Google for joining the far right and the current administration by sticking it to the little guy. After this administration leaves office, I hope Google follows suit. We need a new search engine run by small business people who won’t go public and won’t sell out to the MAN!

Regards,

Kai Guettner
http://www.YouCanFixYourCredit.com

I have a no adsense, straight forward, sales letter style, name squeeze page with 300 words of content and I have just cancelled my AdWords account.

I don’t know about any of the rest of you folks but this pisses me off. Maybe if they sent a note, (I am subscribed to the email updates) and explained the changes I might jump all the new hoops but overall it seems to be just another case of monopolistic bull in the china shop.

Too bad.

Google adwords used to be good.

Looking for a new PPC account.

I think, however, that they are unraveling the trust they have with some people especially by not explaining what they’re doing, not even to their staff, and when they want to roll out new things like Google Checkout (which is not rolling out very successfully btw) trust with their advertisers counts and there’s not a whole lot of trust to go around.

For those who are baffled by this update, we pretty much figured it out – an explanation is available here:

http://perrymarshall.com/renaissance/googlefiasco.htm

Some preliminary testing I’ve been doing with some clients seems to indicate the following:

1) Google has multiple data centers, and not all of them get updated with the new code at the same time. Further, not all websites have been reviewed to the same degree. (What that means is that in addition to dealing with these user reports, we have to be aware of the signal-to-noise ratio.)

2) What you see is not all that can be seen — by Google. Two identical sites, or two identical Google Campaigns are not the same in Google’s eyes. So, you aren’t seeing what you think you see. (Take everything you observe and learn with a grain of salt. Including this post.)

3) Google *does not* hate landing pages, or squeeze pages. What they seem not to like are sites with no content outside of the direct sales effort.

4) The determining factor does not appear to be solely the landing page itself, but the overall quality of the domain, too. (At least, that’s what we’ve observed – so far.)

I’m putting together a series of recommendations — or at least things to try — which I’ll publish based on my findings. Still doing a few tests, but I’ve got some relatively simple things brewing that should help out quite a bit.

The information here helps.

One client had his minimum bid jacked from 15 cents to $5 and $10. I suggested a few tests and we got those rates dropped back down to 15 cents just a few minutes later.

What we don’t know yet is if those better rates will stick, or for how long.

I’ll post results here, as well as on my own blog at http://www.TrafficAndConversion.com

–Mark Widawer
Author, http://www.LandingPageCashMachine.com

This is a public forum where you might want to show your best writing. After all, someone is bound to click on your name and visit your website. Don’t you want to present a professional impression before they do? Just a thought.

If you ACTUALLY sincerly CARE about people that you’ve always designed your sites with useful content from the start. And these sites are now winning with the Google change.

And all those “marketers” with the name-squeeze crap pages and sales letters are loosing.

And I couldn’t be more happier that they are, because they obviously don’t understand the principle “People come online to get free info, NOT to buy”.

And this should be your attitude. Ofcourse even if I don’t sell, my conversions are still in the 5-10% range.