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Does Google Artificially Inflate Bids During the Holiday Season?
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About the Author
David Rodnitzky (38 Posts)
David Rodnitzky is CEO of PPC Associates, a leading SEM agency based in Silicon Valley. PPC Associates provides search, social, and display advertising management to growing, savvy companies. To learn more, visit ppcassociates.com, or contact David at david@ppcassociates.com.
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Great article. I always thought that the quality score “enhancements” were just a way for Google to soak their advertisers. I’ve seen crazy min. bids pop up out of the blue on important keywords with high click throughs, high ROI, relevant and optimized. My suspisions were confirmed when several client’s names/keywords, which are on their websites, URLs, ads…got min bids jacked up to $5.
David,
It is interesting how you simply accept that companies like smarter.com raise their prices and acknowledge that they need to make a buck too, yet when Google does the same thing, it is unacceptable
Would you rather have Google say outright: “I’m raising minimum bids starting tomorrow”?
Don’t get me wrong, I am not a fan of these covert tactics either but we should be careful here not to have double standards.
Just my two cents…
I haven’t noticed this happening, with my own campaigns which have high click through rates I`ve noticed that bids which were 30p a month ago have gone down to 8p now, for a higher ranking than the 30p originally got me.
Whilst it may be that some bids go up for Christmas, it does seem that if you have a good quality ad, coupled with a good landing page, you are rewarded with much lower CPC’s.
From my own experience, it is the competitors who drive the bids up, and then everyone else copies and you end up with grossly inflated prices.
I’m definitely experiencing this myself. In the last 30 days, I’ve seen about a 10% rise in my avg. CPC, and I’m paying more and more daily to compete for lower and lower rankings. It’s frustrating to say the least.