Hi there, I have been using Google Adwords for several months now to promote products for my business. I have not had any professional Adwords training and simply have been doing my own research and tracking. I have a few questions now in regards to a variety of things. 1) Does having a lot of keywords for a certain campaign effect me in any way? .. One of my larger campaigns has 80 keywords. It is the biggest driving force for our business (It all focuses on a single product, but uses a variety of specific words as well as broad ones) .. Some of these words rarely get clicks, about 25 have 0 clicks but some impressions (only 20-60 for the month) Does having these keywords that get very low clicks/impressions affect my ad rating, or something else that Google defines? Does Google penalize me for this?. My top keyword in the campaign is kind of broad, but has a modest CTR for the topic (3.5%) 2) Does Google penalize me for low CTR? In some campaigns, the more broad matches get a lot more clicks which result in sales, but they also have a lower CTR 3) "Market Value" for a keyword is say, $1.50. If I set my max bid to $3.00, versus setting it to $1.60 will I be paying roughly the same amount regardless as long as the market value is at $1.50 or does placing it at $1.60 benefit me as long as it stays below that? Basically, is it beneficial to make bids closer to the market value That is all the questions I have right now. These are the main things I am not totally sure of when it comes to Adwords and any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
1) The broad keywords that have a very low CTR. If you have been running them for quite some time with poor CTR I recommend you either remove them or move them into a new adgroup and try writing seperate adverts for each keyword in an effort to improve their CTR. You will not get penalised for having a low CTR, however, if keywords are kept running with a low CTR for too long it will reduce your "Google Adwords account wide quality score". This would mean that google would view your account less favourably than normal and so you'll find your minimum bid increasing more frequently... this is simply a measure google puts in place to identify poor performers (perhaps spammers or extremely ill experienced ad writers) and stop their ads reaching the searchers, i.e: a poor advert does not improve user experience and so google tries to prevent it in this way. 2) I guess it's the same thing really. If your keywords get a low CTR relative to others bidding on those keywords you will find that your minimum bid increases and that in general your ad position lowers. In extreme cases where CTR is really low, like below 0.2% you will experience sharp increases in your minimum bid, preventing your ability to bid on those keywords. 3) If the highest bid is on average $1.50 and you set your max bid to $1.60. You would pay $1.51 to appear one slot higher. If you set it to $3.00 then you would still pay $1.51. However, if you set your max bid to $3.00 and someone happens to put in a max bid of $2.90 then you will pay $2.91 to appear one slot higher. If you are not prepared to pay up to $3.00 per click, then do not set your max bid at $3.00, set it only at the maximum you are willing to pay. This advice of course is to be taken with a pinch of salt though, because it is in fact possible to pay less than your competitors and appear higher than them. This is acheived by improving your CTR.
There is nothing wrong with a campaign that contain 80 keywords. Thats actually considered very small. Some of my campaigns contain 5k - 10k keywords. Sometimes even more, it just depends on the needs of the client. There are not penalties for the amount of keywords Google will give low keywords a lower quality score. However it is impossible to eyeball your QS, as 3% may be bad for your industry, while in other industries 0.50% is considered really really good. So don't let but CTR numbers trick you. Google tells you exactly what your QS is. Go to the campaign, click the adwords and then go to the keyword tab. Unhide the quality score column and you will see exactly how well your keywords are performing. It is very common for broad to have low CTR's and more conversions than exact. Again, don't get distracted by CTR %, look at the QS given. You can bid $3 and still pay market value, or even under market value if your QS is much higher than your competitors, but it is always best practice to close bid gaps. If you have $3 bids and your avg CPC is 1.5, then change bid to 1.6. If your avg position is high, then change it to 1.4