Did any of you start some new adwords campaigns recently? It seems like google is trying to "blackmail" advertisers into paying huge cost per click bids for just about any keywords! I think is just unbelievable - I have cases, keywords with no competition at all ( only a couple of ads or so) and I'm still supposed to pay sometimes $5 per click - that's the minimum recommended bid! Is it a joke when they say you can optimize your ad or raise the bid to the minimum recommended value? "Optimizing" your ad has no effect, many of those keywords already have ads highly optimized (in tight ad groups with very related keywords, the keywords appear at least once if not more in the ads, landing page contains all the main keywords, etc) - but no! Still inactive!! Still required to pay $5 a click even on keywords with NO competition. Well, I won't do that!! I'll wait and see if they come to their senses - or I just won't create new campaigns in google at all! I also did an experiment, which again proves how "hypocrite" the system is at the moment - I had an old paused campaign which I just duplicated in a different account now (so I created a new campaign which is basically an exact copy of the paused campiagn - same keywords, adgroups, ads, etc). Guess what, the old campaign, once resumed, has most keywords active at decent cpc prices, the new campaign has most keywords inactive and I'm required to pay on some keywords up to $10 a click!! Outrageous!!
Yeah, it is kind of evil. If you let the keyword sit there at the price you want to pay, Google will eventually come down. Also consider coming up with 2 word combos containing the words you want to run right away.
The price have more then dubbel since i started. But there is loads of none content sites out there. They will take the money up as well.
zamolxes, I think that there is nothing wrong at AdWords Quality Score system at this time - I manage several accounts and for both: old and new accounts I have no problems. an account with a lot of $5,00 and $10,00 is a red flag: probably there is something wrong there - but a few keywords with this is ok You describe you know a lot of the basic rules of the Quality Score system - but as you're describing that you are trying to reset the quality Score creating/restoring a adgroup/campaign - this normally do not works - I think that keyword Quality Score History is stored at account level not adgroup level - so this will not work. Try the following: - Try using the keyword tool to add alternative keywords - accept to bid some of minimal bid values proposed to activate ($.10 $.20 $.40 $.50) for now - delete some of the expensive inactive keywords less relevant ($1, $5, $10) - create ad variations: a minimum of 6 text ads per adgroup - Use dynamic ads ({Keyword:default}) on both: headline and ad body for each ad you'll see that if your ads are relevant the inactive keywords price bid will decrease slowly and some of the inactive keywords will became active. Google select some of the inactive keyword to receive impressions and revaluate its Quality Score: this is why is important to delete non relevant inactive keywords from your adgroup - so you do not waste this opportunity on irrelevant keywords.
I manage a quite a few large accounts and the overall CPC has gone up about $.05 (US) over the last two years.
A friend of mine has two separate AdWords accounts that he often runs the same set of keywords on. The fact is that one account gets better pricing than the other. I don't quite understand that.
Same keywords, same ads. Google's "quality" takes into account the entire history of your account. It seems that sometimes what you need is just a clean slate.