Ok I must be dilusional again, but how do you set the Min. CPC at the keyword level, adgroup level, and campaign level? Can you do this with Editor? Also what is the purpose of the min. CPC exactly? It "feels" like google arbitrarily sets the min. CPC and it is not changable?
You can't set the Min. CPC. Google sets it. It shows the relation between the keyword, ad, landing page, and past CTR. The only way to improve it is to have tightly related keywords, ads, and landing pages and get a good CTR. I takes a few days, but the min. CPC can go down as the quality score goes up (I managed to get a min. CPC of $0.4 to $0.15 in three days). nadavs
To answer the other part of your question, the reason that Google sets high minimum bids for some campaigns is because it doesn't want to show them. As Navads says, Google is looking at your advert, landing page and clickthrough rate, in order to establish whether you have what the searcher is looking for. The advert needs to be relevant to the search term, at least initially. The landing page should not be covered in adverts, should look reputable (privacy policy, contact details, etc) The clickthrough rate should be high, given the position that the advert is in. Combining these (and various other odds and ends) Google calculates the 'Quality Score' of your advert. A good Quality Score is rewarded with low minimum bids. Also, your bids are adjusted using another version of the QS. So if your QS is twice as high as your competitors', you only have to bid half as much as them to appear in the same position. I'd strongly recommend that anyone even considering advertising on Adwords reads up on the Quality Score before they start: http://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=10215&topic=9354
thanks guys, this leads me to my next question: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=695287 about competitor brand name bidding...