Many people have seen their Min CPCs on AdWords raise considerably the past few days right after the AdWords blog posted about a new quality score change.

Greywolf posted screenshots at Threadwatch showing his min CPC going through the roof.

Webmaster World has several active threads, such as: ‘open letter’, determine QS,, been helped, damage control, and an update thread, and many other smaller threads discussing the quality score damage.

I’ve looked at hundreds of our accounts now, and have yet to see a single one taking a beating due to the new quality score system.

I looked through some of my affiliate accounts, and again, no issues.

So, it’s been difficult to assess what exactly Google is seeing from these accounts who have had their min CPCs raised considerably.

However, I can tell you that a min CPC of $0.01 is still possible:

I then looked at one of my AdGroups with a lot of history, spending around $1k/month, that does have an average CPC of $0.64, and average max bid of $1.50. I wanted to know if I lowered the CPCs to $0.01 what would happen in wake of the new system. The results looked pretty good:

So, while some accounts are seemingly being hit very hard by the recent update - there are others which aren’t seeing any effects at all.

It will be interesting to start to put together the ‘factors’ that are making up this change. For the last QS system, there were about a dozen easy-to-spot factors that could be manipulated as necessary. I’m guessing something similar will happen again once the picture is completely clear.

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