Google keeps increasing bids on these. I've gathered about 100+ competition domain names to bid on, but it keeps getting disabled and I have to increase the bids very often.
W** N*, That's cause your landing pages aren't optimized for it. I find Gauhers 'Alexa' technique quite impossible to do with Google. Probably better luck w/ MSN. Guessed who I am yet?
Your minimum bids are based on landing page, clickthrough rate and advert text (in the main part, at least). My experience of the landing page part of the Minimum Bid Quality Score is that a large part of the weighting seems to be on the quality of the page in general, rather than its relevance to an individual keyword. I've not seen any campaigns myself, where some keywords have a low minimum bid, and others have a very high minimum bid, caused solely by the landing page. I'm guessing that you don't have your competitors' names in the advert? If not, that'll be causing a few problems. Also, if somebody is specifically searching for a website, they are unlikely to click on a different one - how's your clickthrough rate? There's not a lot you can do about it, but try writing an advert telling people why they should click on your site, rather than a competitors' site...
How do you optimize your landing page when you bid on your competitors' names then? I do have the competitor's names in the advert but I don't see how to put their names will be on my landing page, it'll look kinda dodgy. Will I get penalized for hiding the text using the same background colour? Should I just go for the general term and stop wasting time on the competitors name?
I don't think you can, really - just make sure that your landing page has all the things that a landing page 'should' - privacy policy, about us, etc. I doubt that the landing page is a major problem, though - I've got a number of accounts that bid on competitor names successfully, without mentioning them on the landing page...
Did you read the rest of the posts? We're talking about competitors' names, which he can't really splash all over his landing page! I don't agree anyway, in this case. Since it's only competitor names that he's having a problem with the minimum bid for, the landing page is probably ok, at least in terms of the general things that landing pages should/shouldn't have. And I have campaigns where I am bidding on competitor names, with a minimum bid of £0.02 - £0.03, that don't mention them anywhere on the site. I think the problem is far more likely to be a low clickthrough rate...