Non-related keywords allowed?

I'm wondering if on Adwords you can bid on non related cheaper keywords.

For example, is there anything stopping me having a site that has expensive keywords such as 'poker', but bidding on keywords such as 'potatoes' (assuming this is a cheaper keyword)?

I know that you would get less clicks due to relevance etc but is it against adwords rules for me to bid on non-related keywords?

 

It's not against the rules, although you are eventually going to pay more than usual for those cheap keywords due to low relevance. Your CTR and QS will drop meaning that Google are going to charge you a lot more due to having poorly related keywords.

But as I said, you are still allowed.

 

Think you'll land up paying more in the long run.

Google operates a quality score system for PPC Ads, the more relevant the ad is to the page content, the less you pay per click. If your ad has little relevance to the page content then I'm going to guess that you'll land up paying a lot more per click.

In addition, not really sure what benefit you'll gain by having ads that aren't relevant to the product or service you offer, how will they appeal to your target audience and attract potential customers to your site?

 

Shows how well that google have the adwords system setup too doesn't it, its deliberately designed to prevent irrelevancy.

 

Exactly! You think, if that was not in place everyone would be getting as much traffic to their site with all the lowest bidding keywords, as long as they could afford to pay for irrelevant traffic.

 

You can but the bid price will much more higher.

 

Why would you want to bid on keywords that are not relevant to the content of your site?

By doing this you will be paying to drive people to your site that won't convert for you and you will therefore be wasting money.

 

Google will give you a very low relevancy score and your ads will
appear towards the last of the ads for those keywords.
But on the other hand, if you have the MOST awesome sales page
that would cause someone searching for potatoes to join your poker site,
then it would work. Of course the answer is to... test.

 

Yes, as sgooey said the trick is to right a killer ad that will pull in the potatoe searchers who are also interested in poker.

Also, the content network, with the lack of QS hassles is the place to test ideas like this.

 

Thanks for the info - I never realised the PPC cost was affected by my content etc - I thought it was literally like an auction and simply depended on what others had bid for that particular keyword.