I'm new to Google Adwords, and something strange happened recently. I started running my ad about 3 days ago. Everything looked good. Lots of impressions. A few clicks. Everything is cool. Then today half my keywords are inactive. Keywords that I was paying 10 cents for, Google now wants 40 and 50 cents for. 2 of my keywords shot up to a dollar per click. Is this a common thing? Also, is it possible for someone else to artificially raise a bid to cause someone else to lose the keyword because they can't afford it? Some of my keywords show no ads at all when I search for those keywords. I am wondering because I know I have gotten the attention of someone that has a lot more money than me, and I think that person might be trying to drown me out with his money. Also, one of my keywords is my own name and a variation of my name. I know others are not paying to use these keywords because no ads show up when you search for them. how can the price go up on these?
Your site and/or campagin has a low quality score. It has nothing to do with other people bidding. When you set up campaigns you will generally get a low price until it is assigned a QS - and depending on how the ad performs and the content of your site - it will be assigned a quality score. It's common for Google to then automatically raise the minimum bid. You can find a lot of information by searching for "Adwords Quality Score".
Google answers this one here: http://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=59646 Simply put, they want to reward relevant adverts/sites, and penalise less relevant ones. They do this using a measure called the Quality Score (or, to be precise, a few measures, called Quality Scores). This is used to determine your minimum bids, and (perhaps more importantly) where your advert will appear for a given bid. For example, if you have a very good QS, a bid of £0.30 may get you third, but a poor one will cause you to appear eighth for the same bid. It's based on a number of factors, some of which Google haven't revealed, but the main things are: Landing Page Quality Advert Relevance (to the search query) Clickthrough Rate Landing Page guidelines can be found here: http://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=46675 Advert text should contain your keyword, ideally in title (initially at least). This is a strong argument for having small, tightly focused Adgroups of keywords. The clickthrough rate is fairly obvious - the more likely people are to click on your advert (Google Search only), the higher Google rates it. A rule of thumb that I use is that in position 6-7, a CTR of 1.5% - 3% is good, in position 4-5, 2.5% - 4% is good, and in positions 1-3, you should get 5%+ if they are above the natural results, 4% - 6% if they are on the right. But these are VERY approximate - they'll tell you if you're in the right ballpark...
What is your CTR? If less 1% start new campaign with one or two ad groups and begin with a few keywords only. If you can reach 1.5-2% CTR for your main keywords during 3-4 days, add new ad groups and keywords. Don't forget to keep CTR
The reason your bids started low is they check quality score in a couple places and at different stages of the account running. So out of the gate, they give you the benefit of the doubt, but as you get clicks they have a base ctr to work off of and you may see bids go up if the ctr and landing page and ad copy is not good...