Hi all Adwords Masters, One of the strategy to get high Quality Score is to bid high first. When you bid high, your ad position will be on top listing which can attain high CTR. Thus, your quality score will be from 'poor/ok' to 'great'. (assuming you have genuive & relevant landing page with well written Ad text) After you achieve Great Quality Score, you can slowly lower down your bid to an optimum level. And your ad position will be drop to may be 4th~6th position. My question is, after lower down my bid and my ad position move to right, 4th~6th position. My CTR will reduce accordingly. When CTR drop, will the Quality Score drop again? If quality score drop to "poor/ok", whats the point of bid high initially? Or is there any thing wrong with this bidding strategy?
Well, the quality score depends on many factor not only on bid amount. If you are bidding high and getting high CTR for a reasonable time frame and then there is more chances to get high quality score , and if you get this then you will still ranking on top if you bidding low than your competitors.
The whole point of this strategy is to get a good keyword history and because of this, be able to stay up high and gradually pay less for the same position, the idea is not really to move down to lower positions. Of course if you do choose to lower your bid and go for a lower position your keyword history will give you a slight advantage over newer advertisers. But you are correct in saying that your CTR will drop and over time you 'might' get a lower quality score. Eventually your 'google juice' i.e. the great history you built up will average out to a lower overall CTR and eventually you will no longer benefit from your previously built up history.
Hi T Media, My reason of lower my position to 4th~6th is to get more serious conversion. If i always stay on top (1st/2nd position), my CTR will high but also getting many 'happy clickers' who simply click on the 1st link they see, which is not my serious prospect. Not to mention the expensive clicks. In short, my ultimate goal is to stay on 4th~6th position (which can get serious conversion). Why i don't want start to bid low? If i start by bidding low and ad position on 4th ~6th, it would lead to low CTR>'ok' quality score>high minimum bid. My industry is quite fierce, full of competitors. Therefore, i have no choice to bid high first to get good CTR history that improve Quality score. (yes, of course i know Quality Score is affect by many factors other than CTR). Now, the problem come. After i attained good CTR history, (hopefully QS will improve from 'OK' to 'Great'), and i move to 4th~6th position, i afraid dropping of CTR will affect my QS.Which is back to square one. My question is 'how to improve this bidding strategy' or 'is there any better way of doing this?'
Hey Eaathen start two campaigns, one normal and other with your strategy and with conversion tracking track all leads. I also thought about this strategy last year but forgot to implement. when you complete your experiment, put result in this thread so we also get some idea.
I've been thinking about this sort of thing alot lately. What if I go on the flipside here and enter a market at positions 4-6 even 7-10 but still manage a 3-8% CTR. Will my ad gradually raise in position and decrease in CPC?
I say move to where the conversion is as long as your CTR is decent. Not worth playing the pay high then guess when to go low game. -Patz
Yeah you're missing the point of that strategy. The point is to keep the top spots but pay far less then any competitors by keeping your ctr as high as possible. If you do it at the start and then lower your bids to 6th or 7th position, you will also lower your ctr and risk high minimum bids. Don't do that. Keep it at the top spots and your bids will lower themselves over time while maintaining the top spots if your ctr stays up there. The "click happy" thing is partially true but do you want clicks and conversions or just the odd conversion?
As I have said, you can decide to lower your position after building a good CTR history. But your CTR is likely to go down and eventually the CTR history for your keywords will average out lower than previously and your bids will go up. As of this moment I cannot think of a way to really get round this. The best you can do is simply start by bidding normally for the lower positions and work on converting enough sales to pay for your adwords. If after a month or 2 you are not successful its time to move on to something else.