Did your Adwords minimum bids (or minimum CPC) go up, making keywords suddenly unaffordable? In July 2006, Google Adwords changed its landing page scoring, with devastating effects on some search engine marketing campaigns. I have seen keywords that were active with a bid of 21 c/click get inactivated with a minimum bid of $10 (yes, that is ten greenbacks per click) in hours. Here are a few data to help marketers in distress:

1. Google appears to penalize display URLs that do not match up to the landing page URL. This single change can bring minimum bids from $10 to less than 21c.

2. Google appears to penalize sites with an invalid robots.txt file. Robots.txt tells bots such as Google's spider about your site. If you do not know what robots.txt should look like, read Google's Webmaster Help Center or contact your friendly SEO/SEM expert. After you fix your robots.txt file, you need to wait for Google adjust their relevance score for your site. Note that Google seems to cache files including robots.txt, so it won't necessarily note the changes you make of it the first time it crawls your site after your change.

3. Deleting a campaign and recreating it can affect your minimum bid. We created a new campaign with exactly the same ad text and landing page in an account with no history for the word, and bid 21 cents on it. Its min cpc was set at $5 (vs $10 in another account with good history for the word). A few minutes later, we deleted the campaign and went through the exact same steps again. Its min cpc was now $10.

4. An irrelevant landing page with a valid robots.txt file can give lower minimum bids than a relevant one with an invalid robots.txt: Next, we created a new campaign with the same ad text, but pointing at an irrelevant domain, and bid 21 cents on the word. The keyword was active!

5. The landing page quality score does not appear to discriminate against click arbitrage sites whose sole purpose is to present ads. We searched for the keyword hyperhidrosis, created a new campaign with the exact ad text from the #1 ad displayed on the search results page, and used a legitimate landing page for it. The min cpc for hyperhidrosis was $10. Then we found a click arbitrage site in the first page of ads for the hyperhidrosis search, and created a new campaign with that same exact ad text and landing page. Here's the site: http://tinyurl.com/zvjnu . We bid 21 cents for hyperhidrosis. The keyword was active!

Acknowledgment: This analysis was conducted by Tim McCune.

Here's what Google says on the matter:

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> > Thank you for contacting Google AdWords today. I would like to provide

> > you with more information about inactive keywords and our assessment

> > of landing page quality.

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> > We incorporate the quality of the landing page in the Quality Score.

> > By factoring in the quality of a landing page, we hope to improve the

> > end-user experience and in turn provide advertisers with more targeted

> > leads.

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> > We have developed a list of website tips and guidelines, which can be

> > found here: https://adwords.google.com/select/siteguidelines.html.

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> > Advertisers who spend their energies upholding the spirit of the basic

> > principles listed in our landing page guidelines will provide a much

> > better user experience and could see lower minimum CPC(s).

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> > If you would like more information about Inactive keywords and

> > improving Quality Score, please visit

> > https://adwords.google.com/support/bin/static.py?page=tips.html&hl=en_US.

> >

Up to Search Engine Marketing.