Preferred Cost Bidding

Anyone tried this Preferred Cost Bidding yet?

https://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=52261&hl=en_US

Sounds like a good idea, particularly when setting up a new campaign, when you don't know what percentage of the bid you're actually paying (although you know as soon as clicks start appearing, and you can hit your target cpc quite quickly).

Might also be useful in markets where the bids change a lot at different times of the day?

 

For me it is next move and try to increase average price bid for keywords in AdWords

 

I just don't see this as at all usefull and can't imagine I'll ever use it.

 

The time they took building this could of been better spent elsewhere.

Not even going to test.

 

I think they try to enhance more advertisers to join AdWords. It is not targeted to experienced users.

 

"I don't care about my position, ROI, or competition... just take my $** per click because I've been told I just have to advertise on AdWords but I don't want to have to figure anything out, and I'm too busy to care about results."

I'm sure Google have had a lot of requests for this, and I'm sure that from their point of view it's a great business move (this will encourage smaller advertisers to try PPC as the financial calculations will be easier)

From my point of view it's a pain, because the feature is useless to advanced advertisers and will almost certainly mean far more position fluctuations as Google's system shuffles ads around to try and stabilise these people's CPC.

 

I believe that your competition are irrelevant and you aren't trying to maximise ROI (which you'd achieve by bidding as little as possible)!

I don't think you base your campaign on position or by bidding $x in isolation, as the profit that you make = profit per click * #clicks, so I agree that its value is limited...

On the other hand, I've had campaigns where I've been told to get x clicks at $y per click, and for that, this is quite useful, at least to begin with.

To be honest, I'm not totally convinced that it's worthwhile (hence my question in the first place), but it'll make life a little bit easier for amateurs to - if not make money - then at least lose a bit less, and with a bit more control.

Who knows, maybe this will cut down on the number of people that make crazy bids because they just want to appear in position one (I can dream...)

 

I did a quick read of it and it looked to be quite valuable if you have a goal per click. I set my bids a little high and work my way down to my goal. I seem to get better eventual bids because of a higher click through rate initially as a result of higher inititial bid/placement. I usually know what I need to hold my bids to to get the ROI I want so why not let Google's algorithms work my bids for me.

I have tens of thousands of bids so I am an experienced Adwords advertiser but Google has much more experience and knows what advertisers are trying to accomplish. Experienced drivers use cruise control, experienced advertisers should at least test this feature.

 

I will try it out of course, but I do not put any hope on this feature.

 

Tried it but didn't find it to produce any exciting results. Doesn't seem as it was developed for veteran users.