… that blows no one good.
If you’ve been following the recent AdWords controversy regarding Quality Score you know that a lot of sites have seen their minimum keyword bids skyrocket after the update. This is bad news for them (and I feel for genuine business owners who got pinched in the middle: scrapper sites, MFA, and affiliate marketers on the other hand I have rather little sympathy for), but really good news for me. The reason is that I had previously had competition for all of my keywords, and now… I have a lot less. For example, there were some folks advertising “Best Dolch Word Sites” (which lead to a page of ads, hoping for ad arbitrage) or trying for generic gambling-related bingo sites on the “how do I make a bingo card” keyword. As of today, these competitors no longer exist. Putting two and two together, I’m assuming this is because they’re now seeing $5 minimum bids for their keywords, where they had previously been paying $.15.
This actually has posed a problem for me, since I got vaulted roughly two positions ahead of where I’d been. This has increased my CTR by an order of magnitude (25% CTRs, somebody save me!), which I just can’t absorb on $1 a day. So I’ve reduced by bids in an effort to get back down to my previous, thank-you-sir-I-still-deplete-my-budget-daily ad position. So the upshot is that this should decrease my CPA (Cost Per Action = how much money I need to pay per every additional trial download).
