So I read a few guides on different sites and I was running a global campaign where I was actually targeting people in places like India, Asia, Africa, etc. I had read that to get 1 cent clicks you should use banner ads and used the Google keyword tool to generate a lot of keywords, which is what I did. I had all these keywords in one ad group and bid $.01 and was getting a lot of impressions and clicks for my ads, however then my account seemed to be "damaged". It became nearly impossible to get any impressions for a U.S. campaign even when I did everything possible to optimize, also Google would, no matter what, never approve my ads for the search network. I would be interested to hear anyone's opinion on this, I guess that even though something may seem to be working it could be hurting your standing with Google, well I've closed out that Adwords account and may try to start a new one but I'm going to play around with yahoo for a while and be more careful next time.
Try increasing your bid??? It's never going to easy getting significant impressions with 1 cent CPC max....
@robokoder - on the contrary, it's very possible to get significant impressions with a 1 cent CPC max. In my early days I did exactly that, but as rickdane describes, very quickly I noticed a decline in impressions. For Adwords its simple, they'll test out your ads for a while, but if they don't get a relatively decent CTR, they may as well just rotate the higher CTR ads instead of yours so your impression count plummets.
Exactly you MUST keep your ctr up there for the search network or you will lose impressions because adwords figures out that they're not going to make much money from your account.
No the CTR was about 1% which I believe is good, I was getting the clicks and I was reaching my goal of getting a lot of cheap clicks, the problems came when I then started to try to do a US only campaign and to also do search campaigns (I had been doing what I described above only for the content network), Google would never approve my ads for search no matter what I did and also would barely show my ads for the US content network.. I ended up creating a new account and I need to be more careful about what I do.. I guess its a warning to anyone else, if you use 1,000 + keywords in one ad group Google seems to categorize your account as a spammer, or something and then limits what you can do.
You could have messed up your account by digging it into a hole. It sounds possible from how you described the campaign. If you give Adwords another go be sure to separate things into tighter relevant groups and use separate campaigns for foreign countries. Be well.