I've always wondered this. If I put 1.00 max cpc, does that make every keyword 1.00 or does it set it to the minimum I could pay up to the 1.00 max w/o going inactive?
I'm not an AdWords expert, but I believe it would be the latter. I do know that the maximum you set is not necessarily what you will pay - this can be dictated by what your competition is paying, as well. For example, if you set a max bid of $1.00, and the highest-bidding competitor has a max bid of $0.30, you will be charged $0.31 per click. This would hold true up to your maximum bid. HTH, Sam
yes sam is correct, from my experience also, I see that even though I have $1 as my max cpc, I end up paying only $0.25 or so..this is because either my keywords are not highly competetive or the keywords are highly relevant to my website and so google gives high importance to relevancy and quality of the keywords and reduces the cpc. Thanks http://www.what-is-internet-marketing.com My Blog http://www.what-is-internet-marketing.com/blog
1$ is the maximum you would bid for every keyword. However if you outbid your competitors with 0.05$, google will use of course only 0.05$ and not 1$. The maximum CPC is also a kind of "Cut-off" for every keyword.
Also note that you may want to avoid landing the #1 spot for keywords as you -will- get a stupidly high number of clicks in competitive niches. #3-4 tends to be very effective.
It prevents the AdWords system from going higher than you want to bid - an upper limit, in other words. So if the highest competing bid is $0.25, you will be charged $0.26 per click. If the highest competing bid is $1.01, your ad won't be served and you won't be charged. HTH, Sam