Im new to adwords and I chose as many keywords as I could that had had low advertiser competition and high search volume. I used adwords keyword tool. Most of my keywords showed absolutely no advertiser competition and good average search but I chose 47 keywords and only 45 of them are active. My bids were placed at .30 cents and most of them (even though it says they have no advertiser competition) are saying that I need to raise my bids to activate them. I don't understand why my bids have to be so high if it says I have no advertising competition. Example: One of the words is "ca mega millions". It says I need to raise my bid to $5.00 in order to activate it. Anyone know what's going on?
Even though there is supposedly no competition a lot can depend on how others have set up their programs and how you set up yours. Are you using specific exclusive terms or broad matches that may fall under other keyword combinations etc? To be honest I don't quite understand it all either, when we were competing on "promotional items" a few months back the price was in the range you describe and sometimes quite a bit higher yet at times ads were running that had nothing to do with the actual items which seemed to drive the price up. In the end for some of the reasons you noted we pulled the plug on advertising until we get/got a better understanding of what we were doing. I think other related terms can at times be viewed as competition. As you are finding it's easy to drive traffic if you are willing to spend $4,$5 per click but it's darn near impossible for many businesses to make any money paying that rate.
You're not suppose to be paying that much for clicks. When you start seeing $5 to $10 min bids, thats just google's way of telling you your keywords/ads/landing page sucks. If you turned on the QS display, most of your keywords would have shown up as being "poor". You need to make sure your keywords are grouped into tight relavant adgroups, you text ads is relavant to the keywords in your adgroups (this should include your display URLS), and your landing page is up to google's standards.
Thanks for the answers everybody. I will try to narrow my adwords down. If keywords can have high prices just because of what type of keywords they are and not just because of advertiser competition, then that would make sense because it was all "money" and "work from home" type keywords. Thanks
The result showing you no advertiser competition could be a historical data. May be there were no advertisers by the time when google updated their statistics. For such keywords your landing page should have relevant content to the keyword else the min bid would go up.
Be sure that all these keywords exist in your landing page. Or make another 1-2-3 landing pages with keywords you're interested in. Use these keywords in your adds. If you decided to change LP and campaign structure, delete the existing campaign and start the new one. Google will immediately check your keywords and new LP and should give you more quality. Then try to achieve 1.5-2% CTR to keep great quality score.
I had a similar problem not long ago. I had entered my destination URL wrong and google had found the 404 page. It though it was my landing page and slapped me! Try creating a new ad and making sure the URL is spot on.
Ok that makes sense but I was running a campaign once that went something like this. It was a wedding dress site, and my keywords were all related such as say buy wedding dress, buy wedding dress online etc. The landing page was relevant and yet still the keyword cost was between the same $5 and $10 min bid range. So what could be another reason for the problem?
If your landing page is clearly a bridge page, (no useful purpose except to get the clicker to the merchant), then you'll get slapped with high min bids. Add more content or provide something unique on the site that the surfer couldn't find anywhere else and your bids will drop.
How about your Ad itself? You ad should contain some keywords that are also relevant to your keywords. Keywords in display URL domains also matters. Landing pages is a whole other aspect as far as Google is concerns. There are also many other factors that come into play with it such as where relavant keywords show up..etc. Here's a good reference for how a landing page should look for Google to "like" : http://www.here.org.uk/2007/06/goog...-page-that-wont-get-banned-with-examples.html Also, recently Google decided to put loading time as a factor to your QS...make sure your page loads quickly also. If you do everything and nothing changes, then dump your current adwords account and start a new one.
I think whole Adword thing is just bs and google is just trying to make much money as possible even theres no other bids.
What is the content of the advert and landing page? Min cpc is a reflection of your QS, the Quality Score is made up from relevance of your keyword to your advert, landing page, your click through rate CTR and the avarage CTR on the AdWords network.