Hehe, I’m #1 on Google for I dont like Google

(Even though I never said that)

The past two days have been very interesting in terms of my AdWords campaigns. Basically I run two major adgroups for my website. One of those was hit really hard. Basically I can as well pause it now. Incredible 268 out of 279 keywords have become useless for me. That’s far beyond everything that I could ever imagine. Good thing this group only generated 15% of my paid traffic.
The other campaign has not been hit that badly. The number of declined keywords stays at 62 since this morning which let’s me hope that the worst is over now.
Now it’s time to focus on getting back on track. Some guys in the a4u forum have been really helpful with some things. I’m gonna set up an internal redirection system now which sounds harder than it actually is. Also I’m gonna host the banners all by myself. Just hope Google let’s me in again.
Anyway, it tought me a lesson to put a stronger emphasis on link building in order to increase free traffic.

Also something weird is going on at the moment. The bored guy I was writing about two days ago doesn’t seem to be human at all. I got huge (according to expectations) traffic through one keyword (combination) that targets one specific merchant. It seemed to come through Google ads (however I have been charged only for one click) and loads of sales popped up, too. Even after I deleted all related keywords the traffic kept coming (much less though). Still today I received some traffic by this keyword combination and I have no idea what it is about (can’t be organic). One more Google secret to solve

I just checked my AdWords account and found out that some keywords are offline which had still been online this morning. They do now have minimum bids between four and eight euros. So far it’s only 16. I hope it stays that way.

Affiliates shiver with Google again. Another landing page quality update has been announced just yesterday. The AdWords blog doesn’t give any specifics (as usual) however again it’s affiliate websites which are supposed to be affected most. If the affiliates website doesn’t match Google’s quality criteria two things might happen: traffic from the content network decreases (doesn’t bother me as I don’t get much traffic from it anyway) and minimum bids for keywords increase (would affect me).
Part of the criteria might be to have the order process right on the website instead of sending the visitor away to the merchant. At least that’s what it says on the a4u forum.
We’ll know more in only a few days.