A little over a week ago, I was shoked to log into our our AdWords account to discover that our brand keywords, terms we have registered the trademark for, were inactive because they were deemed “irrelevent” and to activate them, we had to increase the minimum CPC to $1.00.  What the… ?  Our site is the most relevent for those keywords!!!  Needless to say, I was not impressed.

I contacted Google in an outrage.  They got back saying that the ads (which showed the store name) didn’t include the keywords in them.  The rep recommened creating an ad group for the store name keywords and one for the brand name keywords.  In the meantime, after our ppc management company (which I’m anxious to write about and will soon) had uped the bid to $1.00 afterwhich Google imposed a minimum CPC of $5.00!!!  Something’s not right here Google.

Our ppc manager called me the following day to tell me he had been on the phone with Google for about an hour.  Turns out they had recently done an update to AdWords which put significant weight on the ad text and, I believe, the landing page.

Fortunately, Google credited us for the pricey keywords fessing up to the mistake.

Well, I just did some searches on the issue and it sounds like this problem has been going on for weeks.  I’m surprised it took so long for us to be affected.