Minimum Bid Screw-Up

Google has issued an apology to AdWords customers, some of whom may have found that some keywords were erroneously given higher minimum bids. The result of this is that either:

- customers paused their ad, losing traffic
- or, they increased their bid, increasing costs
- or, they did nothing, losing traffic

Apart from psuedo-promising it will never happen again:

"Our engineers have been working tirelessly to understand why this issue occurred and to ensure that the proper measures are in place so that this is not repeated in the future."(read it carefully - it doesn't say they have fixed it)

They have also promised to contact everyone that was affected:

"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."

It would not surprise me if, in a few weeks time, they issue a new statement saying "a small number of affected customers have not been able to be identified - if you think it was you, please contact us..."