Since you can (may) get a higher CTR by bidding higher, could I bid high and then lower the bid and end up with a lower minimum bid? The thought is that I get a much better CTR when I rank around 5 or higher, if I bid high and get a higher CTR I will also get a higher Quality Score and thus have a lower Minimum Bid.
that is one strategy if you have cash to burn. it definitely works. however, no one ever wanted to answer me when is the time to lower the bid
It tends to level itself back out - i.e. you reap the benefits of a high quality score by bidding high early on but as you lower your bid and your placement drops your CTR tends to follow...as does the quality score.
I would hope to prime the pump by bidding 0.20 to 0.30 so I can bid 0.10 and maybe avoid gettting minimum bids of 1.00 to 10.00. I'll give it a try.
I start real low and raise the bid upwards by a small amount every three days. If the ad is well written it will receive a high click rate and tends to jump over bids that are higher. This happens because the impressions are fewer on pages that are further back from the first page and the ads tent to be less relevant or not well written. I often get 50% or higher click rates on these pages. Once you get to the first page it gets harder as the ads are usually well written and you are competing with the experts. Impressions are also high on the first two pages and most people still click on the organic listings and not the paid listings so even if you have the most clicked on paid ad your % rate tends to be very low.. To test this theory my daughter placed an ad based on the same term as mine and found her ad cost $1.30 to rank one place in front of mine which was .83. One problem with this is if you tweak your ad in any way you have to start all over again .
I just recently start using multiple ads in the same ad group. This should avoid your "start over situation" right? I like the fact that I can have multiple set of ad copy and Google serves them up and adjusts the delivery based on performance.
I do use multiple ads, I usually have two or three ads running in each group. I'm not sure about the start over situation in that case though, I'm pretty sure they still move you back as the new ad has to prove itself. Another thing I notice is that I usually find my ads back about 5 or so places at the start of the day when the first impressions come through but by the middle of the day they have gained those positions back. I'm not sure why that is, one reason could be that Google withdraws some ads as their daily budget is spent.
There is an overide feature that you can set so that each ad in your group gets even time regardless of the number of clicks received. For ad testing I find that better than Google basing it on performance as an ad that is good one day might not be the next, you need at least 100 clicks before you can really tell which ad converts best. I can't find that feature any more......can someone let me know where it is please ?.
This is a very interested subject. The famous Adwords expert Perry Marshall also recommends to start bidding higher and then reduce the bids. Recently, I read a very interesting report from adwordaccelerator.com members area. They say that Google doesn't trust new campaigns at the biginning. But when your keywords get 1000 impressions they trust you more. So, the report with video shows how a guy started bidding $2.00 for a highly competitive keyword, and after about 1000 impressions his ad started to show more often, so he reduced the price to $1.00 - and he received the same amount of clicks! After some time he reduced the bids to $0.50, $0.25 and still received the same amount of clicks. Why? Because, he built high CTRs in the beginning - the higher the place the higher CTRs, that's for sure. However, in order to test this theory one has to have a great amount of money in the begining. For the guy that I was talking about, if I'm not mistaken, it costed about $100 to fine-tune his keyword. Maybe this is what experts do? Who knows?
The flaw in that theory is that Adwords only shows the ad in relation to the number of clicks it receives and the $ amount you set it to spend in one day. As the price per click dropped the ad would be shown more so if it was a popular term the daily budget could be spent in a couple of hours. I can't see how a .25 bid, even a 1$ bid would ever beat a $2 bid, no matter how high a clickthrough rate you have. Much more important, to me anyway, is the position of the ad in regard to how much you spend. I juggle the amount around by manageing the position the ad is in**, If it goes too high I lower the amount i bid and if it's too low I might increase the bid. ** You can't tell what the position your ad is in by looking at Adwords Average Position. You have to look where the ad is by doing a search as adwords is invaribly wrong. The drawback to that is you are creating another impression driving down your CTR Which could pose a problem with lightly searched for terms.
I have seen someone from Singapore getting a popular PC-term for 1-cents on his AdWords account while a new account set for the same region and same keyword take 50-cents to take over his position. Anyway, the pay high method do work well especially you have a moderate budget size like $1k/day. Set it to start at $2 for example to get estimated position 1.1, and moved it down to maybe $1 (get at position 3.x), you should see your keywords at position 1 and 2 for a few more days and eventually at position 3 and 4. If there is a lot of competition for the same keyword, you will see that your per click cost is initially 80-cents, and slowlly moving towards $1.00 as your position drop. The quality weight that you gain from high CTR is slowly diminish as your CTR becoming lower. For most keywords/campaigns, it is difficult to have higher CTR at lower position. Well - actually no idea if this is correct - but it did perform as predicted from my past campaigns and tests. So use it at your own risk.
That is interesting...... doesn't make sense but is good to know. What I don't get is right now one of my key terms which is in a group on it's own, lol, is sitting in #9. My bid is 1.03 but but it's only costing me .96 per click. Why doesn't Adwords move it up a few spots to encompass my maximun bid. Today it's CTR is 8%...over the last 7 days it is 7.4% and for last month it is 10.7%. I can't work out why they don't move it up, I'm pretty sure the CTRs of the other ads aren't that high .
I intentionally made the ad copy and landing page for the $2 ad "really bad" and made the ad copy and landing page for the $0.75 ad "really good".
You are only being charged the lower amount because the next guy's combination of bid and quality score is driving your bid to 0.96. The next bid/quality score is somewhere above 1.03. Search through Adwords documentation for more details on Quality Score and it might clear it up a bit.