OK, I put up a brand new campaign for my company last night, replacing an exisiting campaign that wasn't doing a whole lot. On a couple of words, I got an inactive for Search--Bid must be $5.00 notice. One of them only has few competitors on it (it comes up with an alternate spelling when the search is done), though, and for the few impressions it's gotten today, my average position is #1. It's the same landing page as a bunch of other words in the same ad group, and the ad group is all closely related words, so the creative shouldn't be causing too much of a problem (plus, I'm using the dynamic insertion tool on one creative piece, and just created another piece with the dynamic tool AND put the specific keywords in the ad itself). Any ideas on why I still have to bid $5 to stay active? Seems to me if my $5 bid to be active is putting me in the #1 spot, that I should be able to lower my bid some... Thanks. Toonces51
The old campaign Quality Score History is still there making influence on the new campaign. The min bids values has nothing to do with competition. Normally these $5/$10 bids are an alert to a low relevant landing page or a low content quality landing page. I would only pay $5 per click if you really are sure that you will have a ROI with this high bid price - it will not give you any kind of advantage guarantee in terms of the quality of the traffic sent to your site and will not give any advantage in a long term if you decide to decrease the bid again in a short term.
To add to what Micromag was saying, most people who fall into the Quality Score trap are assuming the $5.00 minimum bid is relative to the bids other advertisers are paying. This is totally untrue - you'll get hit for $5 each and every click you take until you improve your landing page, ad copy or get more relevant keywords.
I guess what I really don't get is why this page is considered a poor landing page for one or two specific phrases, when other, similar phrases in the same ad group use the same landing page, and are $0.05-0.06. And historically, we've never even used this page as a landing page--so any historical quality score seems to me like it would be irrelevant. I guess I'll just have to keep toying with it. I continue to find AdWords a frustrating (but necessary) advertising vehicle... Toonces51