All my former keywords (bids of a few cents for each click, #1 position) were suddenly doomed “poor quality” and “not relevant”. The minimum bid was raised to almost 90 cents though there is no competition.
It’s a complaint we hear most often from newbies to the Google AdWords advertising program.
You should see right away that the amount you bid is not the amount you pay. Google AdWords uses a so-called second price auction model the effect of which is that while you may bid 90 cents, the paid amount will probably be much less. The bid in this case indicates your seriousness, how much you *could* be paying. Of course, you can’t know for sure before you accrue clicks. However, based on general experience we may state that the price will be really lower since you have few competitors. Try to get a good click-through-rate and the actual CPC will go on lowering down to $0.10 or so. It should be noted that some savvy advertisers are known to have bid around $100.00 and paid $0.01. Generally speaking, your short-term competitors may increase the average CPC temporarily their actual costs, however, will get them to leave finally.
What you should achieve is to have a nice CTR in the region of 5% or higher, keyword search only. The Google AdWords system is considered to assume a cca. 2.5% CTR until you build up a meaningful history specifying your own actual CTR. Specialists argue the system seems to have a price goal for the space which is in fact a lower limit. In case your landing pages, ads and keywords are fine you may receive a good initial minimum bid. AdWords, however, modifies the minimum bids in stages. The second stage is the very first visit by the AdWords bot exploring your landing page quality and various relevance factors. If the bot results are poor you may see a sudden increase in your minimum bids which newbies are often upset with. Now you need to discover what the problems might be, create a new ad group and cancel the former one.
If the above remedies don’t cure the situation you are punished by a poor account history in the course of the AdWords auction. Established online businesses often rehabilitate such keywords by moving them to a new Google AdWords account. Small ventures, of course, are often unable to follow suite and have more difficulties with solving the problem. All in all, we may state that if you have few competitors you will not have to pay high costs per click for extended periods of time. Precondition is, of course, that you need to build up a meaningful history with acceptable CTR values so as to lower the actual prices. It’s plenty of work to do for any new advertiser.
I was geting punished with this so I have increased my max cpc by about 200% so fingers crossed
@philip – have you improved your QS to 8 or 9 out of 10? That’s a first and better step than just increasing bids, usually. A better return on investment.
I set up an account for a web client and got 11,000 impressions with only 3 clciks in first 4 hours before I realised what was happening. min first page bid jumped to $6.50 I stopped ebverything started agaian , refined and tragetted. Got CTR to 0.90 but still wanting $6.50 or $13.00 min bid
Client obviously can’t afford this.
Are you suggesting the best thing really is to close that account and start fresh to eliminate that sordid history?
alternatively – how long will it take before cost come down.
I assume I have to get qs to at least 4-5
Brand new unrun adgroup has QS 2-3 and FP bid $6.50
I really do need help!!
@jennifer – you need to focus on the Exact Match CTR. From the size of the impression list and the low CTR, you probably have Content Network and Broad Match enabled. You can’t accurately discern the CTR of the Exact Match that way. See the “Getting Started With AdWords Part 1” video – great way to focus attention on driving up CTR. That’s not *all* of Quality Score, but as an initial tactic it helps.
Yes to broad match.
No to content network.
I just watched the video – thanks
We had an expert massage one of our accounts and he had all 3 – broad, phrase and exact for the same phrases in the keywords. He was getting over 10% CTR so seemed to know what he was doing.
Why would he have done that? What are the up side and down side of doing that.