I have two different campaigns, one site each, on the same account. Both campaigns use the same exact keyword as well as others. However, I'm only paying $0.30 per click for the keyword in Campaign A and $5.00 for the same keyword in Campaign B. Why is that, does anyone know? Also, I set up a different campaign for another site with a different, unrelated keyword which isn't very popular on Google and they were asking for $5.00 per click as well. Huh? Am I missing something here?
You meant that it is asking $5.00 to activate the keywords ok? Are you using the same landing page and the same ads? You can try to reset the Quality score for Campaign B: copy the keywords to a text file and delete the keywords - wait some hours and add the keywords again. Be sure that you have at least 1 ad at the adgroup before adding the keywords.
probably he has different landing pages, different ads or have added the the keywords to an ad group with no ads. When you add keywords to an ad group with no text ads the Quality Score calculation fails as there is no Landing page and Quality Score is set to 0 - When the Quality Score is set to 0 The Min Bid is set to $5.00 or $10.00 depending of the Keyword.
You can't have ads running for the same keyword, at the same time, regardless of it they are for the same or different site. You can set up different campaigns for the same keyword, but google will only show one of the ads to prevent the same advertiser from taking up more than one ad position.
This is not a correct explanation why Campaign B Quality Score is so low. You can have 2 campaings running the same keywords - but they will share the traffic. When you setup 2 campaigns with the same keywords both will run and yes both will compete and divide impressions but this do not means that one of it will stop and suffer so must in terms of Quality score to let the other one runs fully.
They don't divide impressions equally if the bid is not exactly the same. CTR will also affect position, which affects the quality score. If one ad has a much higher quality score, then I would use that campaign for the keyword. If they have moved the minimum up to $5.00, then it wasn't performing well anyway. Many people do not realize that you cannot have ads running the same keyword, at the same time.
Does this also hold if you have separate ads pointing at different domains? For example, if I own bluewidgets.com and redwidgets.com, can I run simultaneous ads (different campaigns, one account) for the keyword "widgets" pointing at the two different domains? I believe that what Micromag is saying.
Makes no difference if they have different domains, you can have both but they will compete one with each other: Basically on a same search for the keyword "widgets" Google will never show both ads redwidgets.com and bluewidgets.com to the same user (will show randomly one of the ads per search) - to show both they would need to be on separate accounts - but create multiple account in most cases is against TOS. You can also request to Google an exception if the keyword "widgets" target different markets for redwidgets.com and bluewidgets.com to show both ads in a same search in a same account. But this exception is hard to obtain.
And if anything is different- ad text, landing page... the keywords will have different quality scores. I'd consider anybody fortunate who didn't have to deal with this kind of situation. There must be a way around it instead of having to do this in adwords.