Hello everyone, I think it's safe to say I've mastered the common keyword technique and I've applied it on all my "niche" campaigns. My CPC bids are reasonable (even the minimum bids are way below my current bids), all my keywords have an "OK" quality score and even a few have a "Great" quality score. My daily budgets are reasonable as well. My problem is, although my ads are showing, their rankings are not high enough to place them on the first page of the search results leading to no impressions hence no clicks. I've even experimented by raising my daily budgets to a triple figure but nothing has changed so now I'm kinda confused, I need help, please!!!
Changing your daily budget won't have any impact on your advert's position. That's determined by four things: 1. Your Ranking Quality Score 2. Your bids 3. Everyone else's RQS 3. Everyone else's bids. Your QS may be alright, but it could probably still use some work - try to improve your clickthrough rate. But the biggest problem you have is that your bids are probably lower than your competitors' bids. If they can afford to pay more per click than you can, you'll generally appear below them (unless your QS is much better than theirs, and yours probably isn't yet).
very true on all points. Your basically bidding to low, and if your competition can afford to pay more per click then you should too. If you cant, then your price model is off and your undercutting the market way to much.
Now I'm sure it's not a problem of bidding to low because I've just experimented with that too. I've even raised my CPC bidding to $3 per click trying to see if anything was going to change but nothing worked. I then raised both my daily budget to $800 and my CPC bid to $10 per click but it was still the same unless my competitors are still biding higher than that. What I don't understand is, I have a couple of "Great" Quality scores and the rest are all "OK". On the other hand my minimum bids are all set to less than 5c and my landing page is said to be fine. I'm going nuts now because I can't figure out the problem with my campaigns!!!!!!
The fact is that if your competitors are good at Adwords, an OK isn't really all that great (most of the campaigns that I manage are Great across the board). Here's the thing. Suppose you have a Quality Score of 1.60 (it doesn't matter what the numbers really are - the process is what matters). Google equates this to an 'OK - $0.05' rating. If company A has a QS of 3.20, which Google considers to be a 'Great - $0.02' rating, then in order to appear above you in the search results, they only have to bid half as much. So if your competitor is paying $3.00 per click, then you need to bid $6.01 per click to beat him. It's a problem if increasing your bid to $10 doesn't get the job done, but it depends in part on how much other businesses can afford to pay for a click. If their conversion rate is better than yours, then they can afford to pay more for each click. May I ask what your clickthrough rate is on Search, and the average position that you're appearing in? Typically, depending on your position, a clickthrough rate of 2% - 5% is the minimum you're looking for (5% if you appear first, 2% if you appear 8th), but this is only a very vague ballpark figure.
I agree with custard another thought though, when you mentioned about increasing your bid to $10, how long did you leave it at that level before reviewing your account? AdWords will not update in real time