I spotted something in one of my clients' AdWords accounts the
other day which puts a different slant on the "Google slap" and
in fact is good news for your AdSense income.

Except that I don't think many other advertisers have spotted it.

Here's the background: Google has been raising the price of clicks
for many keywords substantially and this is becoming a really
serious issue for some advertisers. For example, I have a client
who until very recently (last week) had been bidding around about
20p or 40c for clicks on a keyword that was 100% relevant to
what he has to offer.

A few days back, Google suddenly increased the minimum click price
for some of these keywords to £5 or $10.

At this level they are massively loss-making so we just left
the bid prices where they were and moved on.

I think what Google is trying to do is improve the "quality" of
landing pages but their approach has been too heavy-handed. My
client's ads offer people a newsletter. When they click the ads
they go to a page where they can sign up for, yes, a newsletter.

In other words, the page is 100% inline with the wording of the
ad and inline with the expectations of the clickers.

Furthermore, we know for a fact that this is what visitors want
and expect because historically over 21% of visitors have signed
up: quite a high percentage.

But a little Google algorithm somewhere, in its infinite wisdom,
has calculated that this landing page is not relevant to the
people clicking our ads and has bumped up the minimum bid price
(which is what you end up paying for the click too) and this
has ruined, overnight, a substantial income stream for my client.

It's also stopped a lot of searchers finding what they want.

My client is not alone as I'm sure you've seen if you've been
following the "Google slap" online at all.

But what I discovered (and should have known anyway) is that even
if your keywords are disabled for search (because you are only
prepared to bid less than the minimum bid price) they are still
active in AdSense.

In other words, just because your AdWords campaign is not working
on Google's own search page, your ads can still show up on the
AdSense network.

I've been using this trick to continue to attract low cost leads
for my clients even if their keywords are now inactive in AdWords.
In fact in some cases we have increased the bid prices we are
prepared to pay for AdSense clicks because we need the sales leads.

If other marketers follow this practice, the overall pool of
AdSense revenue will increase but, as I said at the beginning,
I'm not sure many people have noticed.

The small print on your AdWords control panel actually says

"Inactive for search keywords have a Quality Score and Max CPC
which are too low to trigger ads on searches for Google or the
search network but they remain active for content impressions."

But it is definitely small print.