Been at this a little while now and it seems to me that Adwords is nothing but a money grab with no regard to helping customers develop effective ad campaigns. Here's the deal and if there is any Google reps out there I dare you to prove me wrong. We sell a children's product that is currently in very hot demand and hard to find. Our site doesn't rank high for a search on these products so Adwords seemed like the perfect fit. There have never been any more than 2 other ads appearing when I search for my keyword. Often they have absolutely nothing to do with the product. Our ad uses the keyword in the title, body and Url. The landing page is optimized well, including the title, H1 Headings and URL Our keyword density is around 20% The landing page is an informational page about the product that does not include any affiliate links, AdSense etc. We have ads that are triggered by the product name as well as phrases and common mispellings. The keyword that is the product name is the most successful. When I restarted the campaign this morning we recieved over 250 click throughs in less than 2 hours. Here's what P*sses me off: Our CPC started at .05 then "Inactive for search" bid .10 or more, so I did then "inactive for search" bid .20 or more. then 40 , you see the pattern. My less successful keywords are still running at about .05 with the same ad and same landing page and a click through rate of just under 2%. My Yahoo account has no problems with the same keywords, ads and landing page and is working great. Is there still anything I'm missing or is Google just trying to ramp up their profits to pay for their Viacom lawsuit?
On this keyword is it was averaging around 2-3%. And before you go there, I have about 10 other campaigns with CTR of between .5 and 8%. I have one running for 3 months with a click CTR of 1.8% and a CPC of under .20 that has never had any problems and I only get about 12 clicks per day. It's only when I start to get a lot of traffic does the CPC go through the roof, like Google smells the money and starts to raise the price. Which i don't get, because when they do I stop the campaign then they don't get the revenue and I don't get the traffic. Who's wining there?
Hmm, everything seems fine, though if you somehow could raise your CTR I assume G will lower your bids.
The only time I use the content network is when I forget to turn it off when I start the campaign. I usually notice when my impressions are way out of whack and the clicks just go to the landing page and no further. I lower my bid to .02 and that makes it almost worth it, for the content network. Just FYI on today's frustration: When they drive my CPC up to .40, I lowered my Max bid to .10 ( I didn't expect anything to happen I was just ticked off.) now my campaign on that word is active again. HAHA Unbelievable
The minimum bid is based on your "minimum bid quality score" (as opposed to the quality score to decide your ad position, which is different). So there are only four things that can cause a high minimum bid on a low-competition term - landing page, advert text, clickthrough rate and keyword relevance. I'm no expert on landing page optimisation - I'll leave that to others. Regarding the keyword relevance, check your clickthrough rate on broad-matched terms - if this is very low, you may have a problem with Google's expanded matching, and you may want to limit your keywords to exact and phrase match (I assume that every keyword is in your list three times, with each type of match)? Your clickthrough rate is not great, when you look at the number of competitors bidding - can you see what the searchers are clicking on? Is one of the natural or other ppc adverts very tempting?
I really would like to figure this out so here is the data from last night. Google "turned on" the exact match keyword and actually the numbers today almost seem inline. The only "inactive for search keywords are 2 common misspellings. Here are the numbers from last night until I reached my daily max$. Exact match Keyword: 2574 impressions 87 clicks 3.37% CTR AVE CPC .26(Which is odd seeing that my max bid was .15) Ave position 1.2 On two keyword phrases I had a CTR of 2.31 and 5.26 but only about a quarter of the impression as the exact match keyword, with an ave CPC of about .09 My one common misspelling keyword had 1100 impressions and 11 click before it got zapped inactive. As it stands today it almost makes some sense (except the higher CPC than I bid) Does anyone know if time of day makes a difference in the min bid? And in terms of the Click through rate being important for min bidding anounts, how is it that you can find page after page of sponsored search on Adwords for many keywords? I can't imagine the ad on page 8 has that high of a click through rate. Are there classes you can take that will teach this stuff or does everyone just learn it through trial and error? Thanks so much for all the input here. It's incredibly helpful.
Take the commonly inactivated keywords, and put each of them in their own adgroup. Perry Marshall (AdWords guru, I recommend his book BTW) calls this Peel & Stick. This way, Google has to reevaluate each keyword again, and the the zero impressions and clicks are not averaged in.
Yes it does, minimum bid quality score, like other quality scores, are relative to the competition. So hypothetically, if you day part to a lower competition time slot your minimum bid will decrease. If you would like to test this concept, set up a landing page, and ad copy relevant to a made up word with no competition and check it out... Unless you have very odd goals, or you are using automated bid software, I can't imagine it would be worth it to day part based on the minimum bid though...
Interesting. From the other posts it sure seems like everyone else is getting a little fed up with adWords as well. SO a couple of things: 1. Time of day might be important in that in my case I sell kid's stuff. Much is bought either during the day or late late at night. It's amazing the orders I get at 3:00 am but it's often moms up feeding the baby. Interesting Idea about setting up a page with a nonsense word to test. 2. With all the people complaining about AdWords and all the Google people telling them it's all about the quality of the landing page etc., has anyone ever answered the question of why bizrate, nextag, ebay, or worse the blatant nothing but adsense filled sites consistently get ranked at the top of both natural searches AND AdWords. is there some "secret trick" they are using or is it just that they spend tens of thousands of dollars or more with google so the greedy bastards look the other way? Thoughts?
In the main part, I get on fine with Adwords. If you've got a well designed site, with competitively priced products, and a good range, and you work out which position in the search results will maximise your profits (see my blog on epiphanysolutions.co.uk about the Sweet Spot for details), and constantly test and improve your advert text, and regularly adjust bids on under/overperforming keywords, you'll get good results most of the time. As a very crude rule of thumb... If you aren't getting clicks, people don't like your advert. If you can't convert the clicks, then either your keywords and advert are misleading, or there's a problem on your website (price, range, design, landing page, checkout process,...). If you get clicks, convert well and still lose money, you're bidding too much on the keywords... The quality score annoys most people, I think - I'm starting to agree with the maxim that "Ignorance is Bliss". I've got a campaign about flight information, and am bidding on terms around most of the major airports in the UK. They all get a QS of Okay, except Doncaster, which is Great. The advert doesn't mention Doncaster, the clickthrough rate is average, and the landing page doesn't mention it more than the other airports. I will probably never know what makes Doncaster special...