Remember back in February when some advertisers minimum bids went through the roof?

Google are now finally crediting back further clicks accured in error during this period. Credits have been issued by a standard email which explains;

On Friday, February 16, 2007, AdWords experienced a technical issue impacting minimum bids for some keywords. This occurred during a routine system update unrelated to the Quality Score enhancements that were released at the end of February. This issue was resolved Saturday, February 17, 2007, and all minimum bids have been adjusted to their correct amounts. We have confirmed that your account was affected and have issued a credit of XXX GBP to your account.

Accounts affected by this issue experienced an increase in the minimum bid for some keywords. This caused some of these keywords to become inactive for search, while other keywords experienced a higher actual cost-per-click (CPC) because of the minimum bid increase. (However, you were never charged more than your maximum CPC.)

Affected advertisers are those who overpaid for clicks in the following two cases:

- An advertiser raised his or her maximum CPC to exceed the new minimum bid.

- An advertiser’s existing maximum CPC was above the incorrect minimum bid applied to the keyword during this time frame. This resulted in the ad continuing to run, but in some cases resulted in advertisers paying more than they would have otherwise because an ad must pay at least its minimum bid in the auction.