I don't understand ADWORDS at all. Here is what I did a test with. I picked a very competitive industry NOTE: - Overture top bid is 4.43 5th place is $1.45 I then created my landing page with as much information about the subject as I could find. I then found about 100 keywords on ADWORDS that were directly related to the landing page. Well they won't even let any of my ads to play because.....(lowest BID to activate the keywords...all of them is $10) What is the deal....I can't afford to run any ads......10 bucks to just activate the keyword....are you kidding me. Is there anyway to lower this? What else am I supposed to do to raise quality of landing page? This is crazy
Hmmm, strange, usually i see my minimum bid is around $0.02. Even though the landing page has nothing much to do with the keywords i selected.
I even find that if I bid on keywords that are absolutely worthless to everyone (nobody bids on them)....my minimums are still at least .35 cents.....
I too have been aggravated by the pricing scheme that Google uses. Some keywords that I use were very effective when I was getting them for 5 cents each, but then all of a sudden minimum bid jumps to 5 DOLLARS and there is no competition for that keyword. I just don't get it... other than Google is out to make easy money, or kill off the little guys one by one.
Same thing happened to me, I was paying for the keywords about 7 - 10 cents. Then all of sudden most of the keywords' minimum bid was raised to 20 cents and the next day to $1.00. And after a week or so they are back to normal < 10 cents. Could it be due to "Landing Page" feature/update? I am advertising for a legit site (which has one Adsense block) and not a page made to earn money by driving trafic.
I suspect it is due to the latest AdWords update but I doubt the AdSense ad on the landing page is causing the problem although it is possible. I suspect Google is looking at the content of the page itself. I get the impression that Google is trying to drive certain types of sites out of its AdWords program. If you are concerned about your pricing you should contact Google AdWords support and find out why the pricing is so high. It will be very interesting to see how this new pricing scheme shakes out.
Google has started running their landing page algorithm and it is slamming pages that they believe are Made For Adsense or are of little value to people searching for them. On the official Google forum, they state that this was started about 4 days ago. This would explain why many of your keywords have jumped to 5 or 10 dollars to activate. They are trying to weed out scrapers and site that offer very little content and are just trying to get viewers to click on the ads on any given page. Google is going to lose a bunch of money over this but they are trying to clean up their search results.
Also - just because the minimun bid is $10.. doesn't mean they're going to charge you that much. I have some bids set to max $1.50.. and the "average" i pay is in the 30 cent range.
Try removing the Adsense from the landing page. I have an ad free landing page and Google is charging me 33%-66% of what I am bidding.
I agree with this assessment, and I think the same dynamic will eventually play out with AdSense publishers. In the short-term, Google stands to lose a lot of money, but in the long-term, they stand to achieve their prime objective - relevant search results. Sam
In keeping with the theme of this thread, have you always gotten $10.00 bids, or is this something that recently changed? Sam
I just done all my countries from A to Z and diffrent landing page. I was about to start the group once more and Adword says 10.00 $$ for SMS TO ZAIRE? In the same group SMS TO SPAIN is still 0.03 $ Sure i understand them but just adding 10.00 $ in random why? I sent them a letter and my guess i will get standard jibberish back. We trying to improve the quality and in the same time not take to big off a lose here bla bla bla Adword
Another one of my big campaigns went from about .25 cent bids to 10 dollar mins to activate. 900 of my 1000 keywords are now 10 dollar mins. This website has no ADSENSE and is not a scraper or arbitrage website. I hate GOOGLE!
Yeah...I'm seeing a lot of this kind of feedback, both here and at other forums. I think the best thing to do is to let Google know each time it happens, along with a request for action. I know they have a tendency to be "vague" in their responses, but in my personal experience, they do listen to feedback and take action on it. The more times they get the same message, the better. Sam
I was just starting to get interested in using adwords but it looks like a bad time to get into it, damn.