OK, I’m really trying to get my head around Adwords, but it’s driving me nuts. I have a affiliate link that I want to promote, and came up with about 300 keyword phrases to promote it. I ran the keywords through the Traffic Estimator at about .10 per click. The traffic estimates rate a lot of my KWs at position 1-3 at .10. But when I put them into my campaigns, the KW won’t activate unless I put in a minimum bid of $1.00. Am I missing something here? There are only 2 other links on Google’s paid search for the phrase. Opinions, comments and general help would be appreciated from all you brilliant DPers. Thanks.
So are you saying that this whole Adwords things is a blind crap shoot? I just wanted a idea of how much I may pay for these 300 words before I started paying for them. Are you saying there's no way I can do that?
What you are required to bid has nothing to do with how many other people are bidding. http://adwords.blogspot.com/2006/01/common-adwords-misconception-explained.html Your best bet would be to build your own landing page to promote the product. The only way to know with any degree of accuracy is to build a real campaign and put in the word(s) your're after.
The blog post doesn't explain why minimum bid may be high before you even begin to run the ad. They say "optimize your ads", but how can Adwords know how good the ad is until they show it and accumulate some stats?
"So, very low minimum bids are earned by creating highly relevant ad text and keywords that get outstanding Quality Scores. And only the most relevant keyword and ad text combinations will earn a minimum bid of $0.01 (or its equivalent in other currencies)." Google has the data to determine how "good" an ad is pretty quick. If you start with a high minimum bid and your quality score is kick ass your bid prices will drop accordingly. If you're looking for a way to know exactly what your keyword will cost before you start running your ad you'll be looking for a time...cause' there's no way to get that info.
That's another big stickler for me here. I've got all the "buzz" phrases in my ad, the infamous "call to action", that changes the so-called "Quality Score" wants, and I still can't seem to get that CPC down. Like I said, if I were against 7 other bidders, I could understand it. But there's only 2 other ads. 2. That's the frustration here.
It's not above buzz words or a call to action, it's about presenting an ad (and landing page on the other side) that's highly relevant to what the end user searched for. If you have a high quality score the CPC will drop over time, but it won't happen overnight. I totally understand the frustration...all I can say is learn to work within the system because the system won't change for you Good luck!
Just out of curiousity yragcom1, are you building ads for each keyword? or at least splitting them up into a few dozen mains ads? I've heard it more than a few times now on this forum and another adwords forum that making ads for each keyword is extremely time consuming but it pays off in spades. specificity I'm guessing is one of the ways to decrease your CPC and make more sales too.
Yes, I am writing ads for each keyword. I'm seeing that that probably what's going to have to be done, writing a ad for each individual keyword, then adding 1 or 2 variants to each ad. I'm also beginning to see that it's going to be a time consuming process. It's probably going to take me a good 20-30 hours to do this. It was really one the reasons I'm concerned about the traffic estimates and prices.