Ok, I must be missing something besides a need for a higher quality score in my two keywords. The quality score should be great, its targeted, refers back to the original ad...I don't get it. Granted I'm new to adwords so it's likely that I am just missing something...but I'm trying to bid on two keyword phrases that both almost practically came out of my 3 Adlines themselves but google's tryign to charge me something like 5 or 10 dollars a piece! I definitely cannot afford that, that's a good fraction of my (albeit small) daily budget. I have another adgroup that is for just as arbitrary a product but I get by only setting 15 cents as my limit for the keywords in that group. Do i need to put ALOT of keywords in, does that affect anything since I only have the two? But I've tried to start a couple of new ad groups for things that don't get searched that often, I'm not talking like movie downloads, weight loss, or anything like that... I cannot understand why they're charging 5 dollars a click. Perhaps I need to read a "how to make adwords work for you" thread because I only have ONE adgroup in my entire campaign of maybe 20 ad groups that actually works for some reason. A couple of others get a few impressions...but that's it, and all the rest just sit there, I suppose their rates are too high as well. Does anybody here make a profit on adwords by spending more than 50 cents per click when the product's only bringing you back 30 dollars profit to begin with? Especially when the conversion rate may be only 1 in 75, if you're lucky... Any thoughts?
Someone was saying that Adwords is going to increase their costs starting from 2008. Maybe it's the beginning
PPC-Coach is absolutely correct in that although the phrases you've chosen for keywords may have come from one or two lines on your site, that is not enough usage for Google to consider the phrases to be relevant to your sites overall content. I had a similar situation and called google support for a very interesting conversation. Here's the gist of what I learned: To be relevant, there has to be more content on your page related to the information in the keyword phrases you've chosen. If Google deems your keywords only be mildly relevant to your overall ad copy, you will see minimum bids between $5 to $10 per keyword. If they determine the keywords are not relevant at all, you will see minimum bids of $10 - $20 per keyword, as happened in my campaign of nearly 2,000 keywords. The solution is to rewrite your page so that the content is relevant to the keywords you'd like to use for your campaign. If you really believe particular keywords are going to bring you traffic, then make the content of your site relevant to the subject of the keywords that you've elected to use. Also, do a search for info on "Search Engine Optimation guidelines" in order to create a website that falls within Googles criteria for relevancy. Such things as using the keywords in the title bar, in the first two sentences, in the alt tags, and so on will make your site more "Google-friendly" and will help get the keywords you want to use down to a more reasonable price. As far as is it worth spending .50 per click on an item that costs $30, that would all depend on your conversion rate. If you have great copy, and a very targeted ad and can convert say 1 out of 10 people, you'd be spending $5 per sale and making $25 dollars profit. If on the other hand your ad isn't very targetted and you get 100 people clicking and no one buys, you've just spent $50 without a sale. So, it all depends on your conversion rate and that is something that only testing will tell you.