I have run ads on specific keywords and done quite well for a period of time and manages to get very heavy traffic volume for a pretty cheap price(around .10). Then, without reason every word in my keyword list jumps up to $1. Has anyone else experienced this? I have to wonder if it is a ploy by google to suck up more money.
Your CTR must not be very good. Your price goes up when your click through rate isn't high, because Google assumes your ad isn't relevent.
true, Google detected that your ad are not relevant to that keyword - it compare your CTR with other competitor CTR and see that you ad is not relevant - so he offer you a deal, he can publish the ad for that keyword if you pay for the "min bid" value. review the keywords to see if your ads are really relevant to who type there keywords there - you can write new ads, or remove the keyword or pay the price or wait for the time.
Obliviously, Google determines based on Quality Score i.e (CTR, Ad Text relevance, Historical keyword performance and other relevancy factors) You Avg CPC calculated based on CTR and ad copy for respective keywords. Thanks.
Quality Score is also calculated based on the Ad Landing page's quality. But this is something that is a little bit harder to improve compared to the text ad.
I've seen it a few times. In addition to what others have posted above sometimes it can be due to a new competitor in the market.
Yes, this happened to me this weekend. My min bid required went from $.10 to (ugh) $5.00 for most of my keywords. Much of it has to do with CTR and ad copy, both which I need to work on. Back to the drawing board!