Courtesy of the Google AdWords Help Center:
“Even if you have a high quality ad, if advertisers below you are not bidding very much, your actual CPC may not be high enough to qualify your ad to appear in a top position.
With this new formula, instead of considering your actual CPC, we’ll consider your maximum CPC bid, which you control. This means that your ad’s eligibility to be promoted is no longer dependent on the bids of advertisers below you.“
This announcement indicates that Google remains keen to eliminate the long-tail approach to gaining cheap traffic, widely used by so-called (albeit misnamed) arbitrageurs in the SEM industry.
Until this change is implemented, advertisers can continue to place low quality ads in the top positions by bidding on keywords with little competition – generally lengthy, specific phrases.
Like most changes they make, this should be a win for Google and their users – higher prices for their ad inventory and / or better quality ads presented to the users.
Skype, an essential communication tools for millions of individuals and businesses worldwide has been unable to authenticate users during the past 14 hours, rendering the service unusable.
14 hours – and counting. One can scarcely imagine the magnitude of the technical failure that causes such a lengthy outage.
Although Skype offers paid-for, business critical services including inbound geographic number routing and outbound PSTN dialling, they have long – and wisely – avoided any commitment to deliver emergency call services. And you can understand their reluctance to start now.
This event also highlights the challenge of keeping customers informed; a typical Skype user almost nevers dials www.skype.com into their browser, so how to get the word out about the outage and status updates?
Luckily (or not), many major media outlets are covering the issue more than adequately.
Fingers crossed for Skype’s engineers that they can effect a resolution soon.
Don’t be shy – your customers really want to know just how reliable your service is. So go ahead and brag about it with our Public Uptime Reports.
When enabled, you can place one of our funky uptime badges on your site showing uptime from the previous 24 hour, 7, or 30 day period. You can also link through to a detailed uptime report where visitors can examine your uptime history on a yearly, monthly, or daily basis.
Take a look at this example – and click to see the full report:
It’s a great way to show your customers that uptime is important to you – Could this transparency be your edge over the competition?
