I should have been more careful, but somehow the last Adwords campaign I did I neglected to uncheck the content box on where I wanted the ads to show up. My keywords were at 5 cents. Overnight, my keyword cost went up to $10! Of course, the reason was that I had over 700 ad views with no clicks. My question is: 1. Would it be better to just open another Adwords account under another name? If so, won't my social security number give me away? 2. Or should I do a short campaign on some other niche that will assure me of some good CTR? 3. Or should I just do a few keywords on the campaign with the high bids and try to get them down with better CTR? Any thoughts would be appreciated! Thanks, Chris
The reason your cost went up to $10 was nothing to do with content network impressions. Google expect the ctr on content match to be lower than on search "Don't worry if your clickthrough rate (CTR) on content sites is lower than what you're used to seeing on the search network. It's normal for CTR to be lower on the content network because user behavior on content pages is different than on search sites -- users on content pages are browsing through information, not searching with keywords"
Yeah, search/content's CTR% is 2 totally different things. Essentially, there are 2 kind of slaps. 1: You're getting those $0.30-$0.45 Good/Poor bids. Meaning you probably did 'some' page optimization,but not good enough for these keywords. 2: Those irritating $5-$10 slaps. Basically means your landing page is deemed irrelevant (not sufficient content), your CTR% is terrible (<0.5%), and everything else that can possibly go wrong (badly grouped ad groups, unrelated keywords etc.) If they're giving you $10 min. bids, FORGET about bidding $10 and hoping your CTR% will drop. If you're saying ya gonna bid $0.3-$0.45, it still sounds more reasonable. But $10, forget it. Google WILL charge you for it, and you'll burn yourself real bad. If you've been having many of such historically lousy CTR% campaigns, best is to start a totally new account, as Google takes your overall account history into consideration as well....
It would be better to first check the quality score. To get "GREAT" for this quality score, your keywords should appear in the 3 lines of your ad and also in the landing page.