I only signed up to Adwords and created my first campaign a few days ago. At first I had to pay around $0.10 per click, but I fixed my landing page; adding more content, more pages, paid attention to keywords and such, and then my CPC went down to $0.05 for some keywords and $0.06 for the rest. That was for only 1-3 days. Just today out of nowhere, all my keywords are inactive and Adwords is making me bid $0.13 / click. My quality score is "Ok". Does anyone know what I might be doing wrong? Could this be the case? http://www.webmasterworld.com/google_adwords/3536927.htm
I'm just wondering what could've made the minimum bids rise. There is noone else competing, other than some other affiliate who was very quickly removed because he was using a cloaked page. I was quite happy paying only $0.05 per click.. and even got a sale after 13 clicks.
It most likely has to do with your quality score. Count yourself lucky, I have seen people's bids go up a lot higher than that.
Yeah its probably quality score, I can't even use my current adwords account on the search network, no matter what they won't approve my landing page, I think its because of past campaigns that I made before I really understood their search advertising so I just do content network for now. I know a lot of people may disagree with this but I think its best to concentrate on the content network at first as its much more forgiving, it can drive you insane trying to figure out why Google raises your search ad price / disapproves landing pages, etc. Think of it this way: Google views the ads that appear next to search results on Google.com as a reflection of their company, they have very high standards and do a lot to discourage advertisers who may not be legitimate or who are advertising things that don't directly relate to the search results from displaying ads next to the search results. Unfortunately they are also not willing to give second chances so if problems persist with the search advertising it is usually necessary to create a new adwords account (as past click through ratio and ad relevancy are tracked by Google for search placement ads and factor into your future price for ads) For the content network, Google seems to view the ads that appear as a reflection on that particular site that is displaying Adsense ads (which they don't own) so basically they don't give a s#%t if the ads are making a site look bad because its not really making Google look bad and they could care less if they screw over some small time website owner, so this all adds up to it being a lot easier to "exploit" the content network than Google's "pet" search results.
Try to bid lower for that keyword. What was your max bid for that keyword so that google will put your ads on? But how come when your keywords are inactive you still getting to pay $0.13 to google.