Google has announced plans to discontinue its Enhanced Cost-Per-Click (eCPC) bidding strategy for search and display ad campaigns.

This change, set to roll out in stages over the coming months, marks the end of an era for one of Google’s earliest smart bidding options.

Dates & Changes

Starting October 2024, new search and display ad campaigns will no longer be able to select Enhanced CPC as a bidding strategy.

However, existing eCPC campaigns will continue to function normally until March 2025.

From March 2025, all remaining search and display ad campaigns using Enhanced CPC will be automatically migrated to manual CPC bidding.

Advertisers who prefer not to change their campaigns before this date will see their bidding strategy default to manual CPC.

Impact On Display Campaigns

No immediate action is required for advertisers running display campaigns with the Maximize Clicks strategy and Enhanced CPC enabled.

These campaigns will automatically transition to the Maximize Clicks bidding strategy in March 2025.

Rationale Behind The Change

Google introduced Enhanced CPC over a decade ago as its first Smart Bidding strategy. The company has since developed more advanced machine learning-driven bidding options, such as Maximize Conversions with an optional target CPA and Maximize Conversion Value with an optional target ROAS.

In an email to affected advertisers, Google stated:

“These strategies have the potential to deliver comparable or superior outcomes. As we transition to these improved strategies, search and display ads campaigns will phase out Enhanced CPC.”

What This Means for Advertisers

This update signals Google’s continued push towards more sophisticated, AI-driven bidding strategies.

In the coming months, advertisers currently relying on Enhanced CPC will need to evaluate their options and potentially adapt their campaign management approaches.

While the change may require some initial adjustments, it also allows advertisers to explore and leverage Google’s more advanced bidding strategies, potentially improving campaign performance and efficiency.

Featured Image: Vladimka production/Shutterstock

We analyzed the organic traffic growth of 1,600 SaaS companies to discover the SEO strategies that work best in 2024…

…and those that work the worst.

In this article, we’re looking at the companies that lost the greatest amount of estimated organic traffic, year over year.

• We analyzed 1,600 SaaS companies and used the Ahrefs API to pull estimated monthly organic traffic data for August 2023 and August 2024.
• Companies were ranked by estimated monthly organic traffic loss as a percentage of their starting traffic.
• We’ve filtered out traffic loss caused by website migrations and URL redirects and set a minimum starting traffic threshold of 10,000 monthly organic pageviews.

This is a list of the SaaS companies that had the greatest estimated monthly organic traffic loss from August 2023 to August 2024.

Sidenote.

Our organic traffic metrics are estimates, and not necessarily reflective of the company’s actual traffic (only they know that). Traffic loss is not always bad, and there are plenty of reasons why companies may choose to delete pages and sacrifice keyword rankings.

Rank	Company	Change	Monthly Organic Traffic 2023	Monthly Organic Traffic 2024	Traffic Loss
1	Causal	-99.52%	307,158	1,485	-305,673
2	Contently	-97.16%	276,885	7,866	-269,019
3	Datanyze	-95.46%	486,626	22,077	-464,549
4	BetterCloud	-94.14%	42,468	2,489	-39,979
5	Ricotta Trivia	-91.46%	193,713	16,551	-177,162
6	Colourbox	-85.43%	67,883	9,888	-57,995
7	Tabnine	-84.32%	160,328	25,142	-135,186
8	AppFollow	-83.72%	35,329	5,753	-29,576
9	Serverless	-80.61%	37,896	7,348	-30,548
10	UserGuiding	-80.50%	115,067	22,435	-92,632
11	Hopin	-79.25%	19,581	4,064	-15,517
12	Writer	-78.32%	2,460,359	533,288	-1,927,071
13	NeverBounce by ZoomInfo	-77.91%	552,780	122,082	-430,698
14	ZoomInfo	-76.11%	5,192,624	1,240,481	-3,952,143
15	Sakari	-73.76%	27,084	7,106	-19,978
16	Frase	-71.39%	83,569	23,907	-59,662
17	LiveAgent	-70.03%	322,613	96,700	-225,913
18	Scoro	-70.01%	51,701	15,505	-36,196
19	accessiBe	-69.45%	111,877	34,177	-77,700
20	Olist	-67.51%	204,298	66,386	-137,912
21	Hevo Data	-66.96%	235,427	77,781	-157,646
22	TextGears	-66.68%	19,679	6,558	-13,121
23	Unbabel	-66.40%	45,987	15,450	-30,537
24	Courier	-66.03%	35,300	11,992	-23,308
25	G2	-65.74%	4,397,226	1,506,545	-2,890,681

For each of the top five companies, I ran a five-minute analysis using Ahrefs Site Explorer to understand what may have caused their traffic decline. 

Possible explanations include Google penalties, programmatic SEO, and AI content.

Causal	2023	2024	Absolute change	Percent change
Organic traffic	307,158	1,485	-305,673	-99.52%
Organic pages	5,868	547	-5,321	-90.68%
Organic keywords	222,777	4,023	-218,754	-98.19%
Keywords in top 3	8,969	26	-8943	-99.71%

Causal is a finance platform for startups. They lost an estimated 99.52% of their organic traffic as a result of a Google manual penalty:

This story might sound familiar. Causal became internet-famous for an “SEO heist” that saw them clone a competitor’s sitemap and use generative AI to publish 1,800 low-quality articles like this:

Google caught wind and promptly issued a manual penalty. Causal lost hundreds of rankings and hundreds of thousands of pageviews, virtually overnight:

As the Ahrefs SEO Toolbar shows, the offending blog posts are now 301 redirected to the company’s (now much better, much more human-looking) blog homepage:

Contently is a content marketing platform. They lost 97% of their estimated organic traffic by removing thousands of user-generated pages.

Almost all of the website’s traffic loss seems to stem from deindexing the subdomains used to host their members’ writing portfolios:

A quick Google search for “contently writer portfolios” suggests that the company made the deliberate decision to deindex all writer portfolios by default, and only relist them once they’ve been manually vetted and approved:

We can see that these portfolio subdomains are now 302 redirected back to Contently’s homepage:

And looking at the keyword rankings Contently lost in the process, it’s easy to guess why this change was necessary. It looks like the free portfolio subdomains were being abused to promote CBD gummies and pirated movies:

Datanyze provides contact data for sales prospecting. They lost 96% of their estimated organic traffic, possibly as a result of programmatic content that Google has since deemed too low quality to rank.

Looking at the Site Structure report in Ahrefs, we can see over 80% of the website’s organic traffic loss is isolated to the /companies and /people subfolders:

Looking at some of the pages in these subfolders, it looks like Datanyze built thousands of programmatic landing pages to help promote the people and companies the company offers data for:

As a result, the majority of Datanyze’s dropped keyword rankings are names of people and companies:

Many of these pages still return 200 HTTP status codes, and a Google site search still shows hundreds of indexed pages:

In this case, not all of the programmatic pages have been deleted—instead, it’s possible that Google has decided to rerank these pages into much lower positions and drop them from most SERPs.

Bettercloud is a SaaS spend management platform. They lost 94% of their estimated organic traffic around the time of Google’s November Core Update:

Looking at the Top Pages report for BetterCloud, most of the traffic loss can be traced back to a now-deleted /academy subfolder:

The pages in the subfolder are now deleted, but by using Ahrefs’ Page Inspect feature, it’s possible to look at a snapshot of some of the pages’ HTML content.

This short, extremely generic article on “How to Delete an Unwanted Page in Google Docs” looks a lot like basic AI-generated content:

This is the type of content that Google has been keen to demote from the SERPs.

Given the timing of the website’s traffic drop (a small decline after the October core update, and a precipitous decline after the November core update), it’s possible that Google demoted the site after an AI content generation experiment.

Ricotta Trivia	2023	2024	Absolute change	Percent change
Organic traffic	193,713	16,551	-177,162	-91.46%
Organic pages	218	231	13	5.96%
Organic keywords	83,988	37,640	-46,348	-55.18%
Keywords in top 3	3,124	275	-2,849	-91.20%

Ricotta Trivia is a Slack add-on that offers icebreakers and team-building games. They lost an estimated 91% of their monthly organic traffic, possibly because of thin content and poor on-page experience on their blog.

Looking at the Site Structure report, 99.7% of the company’s traffic loss is isolated to the /blog subfolder:

Digging into the Organic keywords report, we can see that the website has lost hundreds of first-page rankings for high-volume keywords like get to know you questions, funny team names, and question of the day:

While these keywords seem strongly related to the company’s core business, the article content itself seems very thin—and the page is covered with intrusive advertising banners and pop-ups (a common hypothesis for why some sites were negatively impacted by recent Google updates):

The site seems to show a small recovery on the back of the August 2024 core update—so there may be hope yet.

Final thoughts

All of the data for this article comes from Ahrefs. Want to research your competitors in the same way? Check out Site Explorer.

According to details surfacing online, ad management firm Mediavine is terminating publishers’ accounts for overusing AI.

Mediavine is a leading ad management company providing products and services to help website publishers monetize their content.

The company holds elite status as a Google Certified Publishing Partner, which indicates that it meets Google’s highest standards and requirements for ad networks and exchanges.

AI Content Triggers Account Terminations

The terminations came to light in a post on the Reddit forum r/Blogging, where a user shared an email they received from Mediavine citing “overuse of artificially created content.”

Trista Jensen, Mediavine’s Director of Ad Operations & Market Quality, states in the email:

“Our third party content quality tools have flagged your sites for overuse of artificially created content. Further internal investigation has confirmed those findings.”

Jensen stated that due to the overuse of AI content, “our top partners will stop spending on your sites, which will negatively affect future monetization efforts.”

Consequently, Mediavine terminated the publisher’s account “effective immediately.”

The Risks Of Low-Quality AI Content

This strict enforcement aligns with Mediavine’s publicly stated policy prohibiting websites from using “low-quality, mass-produced, unedited or undisclosed AI content that is scraped from other websites.”

In a March 7 blog post titled “AI and Our Commitment to a Creator-First Future,” the company declared opposition to low-value AI content that could “devalue the contributions of legitimate content creators.”

Mediavine warned in the post:

“Without publishers, there is no open web. There is no content to train the models that power AI. There is no internet.”

The company says it’s using its platform to “advocate for publishers” and uphold quality standards in the face of AI’s disruptive potential.

Mediavine states:

“We’re also developing faster, automated tools to help us identify low-quality, mass-produced AI content across the web.”

Targeting ‘AI Clickbait Kingpin’ Tactics

While the Reddit user’s identity wasn’t disclosed, the incident has drawn connections to the tactics of Nebojša Vujinović Vujo, who was dubbed an “AI Clickbait Kingpin” in a recent Wired exposé.

According to Wired, Vujo acquired over 2,000 dormant domains and populated them with AI-generated, search-optimized content designed purely to capture ad revenue.

His strategies represent the low-quality, artificial content Mediavine has vowed to prohibit.

Potential Implications

Lost Revenue

Mediavine’s terminations highlight potential implications for publishers that rely on artificial intelligence to generate website content at scale.

Perhaps the most immediate and tangible implication is the risk of losing ad revenue.

For publishers that depend heavily on programmatic advertising or sponsored content deals as key revenue drivers, being blocked from major ad networks could devastate their business models.

Devalued Domains

Another potential impact is the devaluation of domains and websites built primarily on AI-generated content.

If this pattern of AI content overuse triggers account terminations from companies like Mediavine, it could drastically diminish the value proposition of scooping up these domains.

Damaged Reputations & Brands

Beyond the lost monetization opportunities, publishers leaning too heavily into automated AI content also risk permanent reputational damage to their brands.

Once a determining authority flags a website for AI overuse, it could impact how that site is perceived by readers, other industry partners, and search engines.

In Summary

AI has value as an assistive tool for publishers, but relying heavily on automated content creation poses significant risks.

These include monetization challenges, potential reputation damage, and increasing regulatory scrutiny. Mediavine’s strict policy illustrates the possible consequences for publishers.

It’s important to note that Mediavine’s move to terminate publisher accounts over AI content overuse represents an independent policy stance taken by the ad management firm itself.

The action doesn’t directly reflect the content policies or enforcement positions of Google, whose publishing partner program Mediavine is certified under.

We have reached out to Mediavine requesting a comment on this story. We’ll update this article with more information when it’s provided.

Featured Image: Simple Line/Shutterstock