The minimum bid was increased by an error

Feb 21, 2007 08:34 GMT  ·  By

The short story until now: last Friday, the AdWords team tried to check the advertising platform's functionality but encountered a serious issue regarding the minimum bid for certain keywords selected by the publishers. Although the bug wasn't related to the maximum cost per click of the keywords or with the Quality Score for some ads, certain publishers were disadvantaged by the issue. The Google employees tried to repair it quickly and managed to patch the bug on Saturday morning for all the affected keywords.

On the Inside AdWords blog, the Google team posted the most popular questions since the technical issue was discovered. "Will you be issuing credits?" was one of the questions. "Once we have completed our analysis of the impact, we'll automatically issue credits to advertisers who overpaid due to this issue. As soon as these credits have been applied, we'll email the affected advertisers to let them know," the employees answered.

"I paused some of my ad groups because the minimum bids increased and they are still unusually high. What should I do? If you paused any of your ad groups on Friday due to this issue, we recommend that you unpause them, but do not raise your maximum CPC. Unpausing your ad group should allow the minimum bid to return to normal without taking any other action," they added.

One of the most interesting aspects of the blog post is the last question published by the Inside AdWords team that asked: "Will this happen again?" The answer is obviously negative because Google can't sustain the solution is vulnerable to technical problems as many other similar solution are continuously fighting to attract users currently registered for the search giant's product.