• Wired, Friday, April 4, 2008 11 AM

A major change to Google's AdWords "is resulting in a double-whammy for some advertisers." While Google says its revisions to AdWords are meant to drive more value for advertisers, some claim that the rates they're paying have shot up, while conversions have dropped. As a result, these unhappy advertisers are calling the move the "Google slap."

Google claims that serving fewer, more relevant ads for a given search query will not only raise click-through rates, but will also cause advertisers to bid more on ads, thus boosting Google's bottom line. Advertisers, meanwhile, may get fewer but better quality leads from their ads. According to an unnamed but affected advertiser, his leads fell from 100,000 impressions and $250,000 in revenue on ads served for two keywords in February to 20,000 impressions and zero revenue.

As a result, the advertiser started buying more keywords from Yahoo and Microsoft.

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