I'm running a lead campaign, and the lead payout is only $3.00. Not a whole lot of room in this, but it's an interesting niche. So I spent the good portion of a day digging through the keyword tool for phrase matches for my keywords. I ended up finding about 1400 keyword phrase matches that have traffic estimates of about 1000 - 10,000+ search results a month all for the low low price of 5¢ a click. Stoked right? Not so much I made everything live and I haven't received a single impression in the last three days. Adwords is now quoting me first page CPC of at least 20¢ on all keywords, with most being closer to $1-2. I don't get it.. admittedly, I'm new to adwords as an advertising source. Is this fairly normal? I'm just confused as to why the original quote was at 5¢ and now it's a buck or more. Annoying.
This type of question comes up all the time. The tool is an estimate. It is based on historical QS averages and current trends in what people are bidding. So if you don't get to the average, you will pay more. Google doesn't know how good you are and why it uses averages. It is not what people are paying for those keywords to be in the top three positions. It's the estimate using an average quality score (which the vast majority of people achieve and Google assumes you will too) and what you will need to pay to get those positions. If you bid that amount with an average QS, you will not get those positions. You may even be told to bid higher to even get on the first page, depending on how many competitors there are. The advertisers with the highest QS and ranking in the top positions (read Adwords FAQ for more details) are not paying that amount but likely less. Sometimes a lot less. I've achieved CPCs half of the quoted estimate on a regular basis simply with a high QS.
thanks for the reply.. I can understand quoting .50 then asking for a dollar, but every one of my keywords was an estimate of .05 and then they bump it up to $1-2. that seems pretty to be a pretty drastic estimate. Right now I have two adds running for all 1400 keywords. I didn't create ad groups for individual keywords to raise my qs. i just wanted to see what was being searched for first before I went crazy with the optimization. At this point, though, the ads don't even show up. If I search for any of my keywords my ad simply isn't there. The ads for this keyword only ran two pages deep, you'd think mine would at least be dead last.
Not only do you have to bid enough to appear on first page on a regular basis, you must have a high enough budget. Otherwise, your ads won't show as often. Are your ads approved? What is your QS?
I have a couple of keywords that I am paying 4.50 click for an google tells me that there is not enough traffic for a bid estimate. I have given up trying to understand them.
I think improved quality score can get your cpc down. There are many ways to improve your QS. I think you need to have different ad-groups for different categories, so that lower quality score of one category doesn't affect the other keywords. Also you need to optimize your landing pages for extra boost to your QS. PM me if you need more help.