Hi, I am now to adwords and i have to say its not very usable. The bidding process of crazy... apart from the mad fact that you cant see a competitors bid... there nothing else to put the bidding process in context. Do i put in €40 or €400. Recently i have been trying to find out what percentage of time my ad is active and use that information to gague how much i need to spend for it to be active 100% of the time. I cant find that that information? Does anyone know where i can find out what percentage of time my ad is active? Or is there some better hueristic i could base my bid on? (not that i consider this bidding! ). I believe there used to be overture tools that allowed you check a competitors bid but they are no longer active.
To get an idea what others are bidding use the "Google Traffic Estimator". This shows you an average range of bids for your selected keywords. If you want to appear higher than the other ads, one thing you can do is set your bid higher than the amounts seen on the traffic estimator. Unfortunately there is no way to actuallly see what others are bidding, you can only see an average range. Paying more does not warrent your advert being shown 100% of the time. There are 4 things you should know: -Firstly you can tell google to either show your ads evenly throughout the day or accelerate showings to come up more often. By default it is set to show ads evenly throughout the day so that your ad gets equal exposure during different times of the day. I often used the accelerated option which is located in "edit campaign settings" -Secondly you will only appear up until your daily spending cap runs out. If you find you hit your daily spending budget before the day ends and want to appear all day long, you'll need to increase your daily spending budget to allow for it. -Thirdly, you must accept that there may be lots of others who want to advertise on the same keyword, Google will try to give everyone some exposure, but there's only a limited number of slots on the first page. -Fourthly if you keep searching your own keywords, google will stop showing your own advert to you. They determine that either you are not interested in the ads (including yours) and will serve up different ones to see if they can entice a click. If you want to see how others see it, use the google adwords preview tool. There is no tool that will show your advert "uptime". Overture showed you what people were bidding on the overture network and not on google adwords. However it was still a useful tool for getting some idea of what people were willing to pay.
Yes, it is complicated to the new user, but effective... There is a reason for this. If bids were transparent, then competitors will end up in a bidding war for position. (As seen on the old Yahoo system) Keeping the bids private actually helps keep the competitors in line and eliminate bidding wars, which was very common several years ago. There are several references which us marketers can use to help gauge CPC bids and budgets, such as spyfu and google traffic estimator. If you want to see what hours of the day your ad is on and off, run a campaign report and set the unit of time to hourly. You will then see what hours of the day your ads are not showing. Then in the advanced settings check mark the impressions share, lost IS rank, lost IS budget to see if you need to bid more or increase your daily budget to capture those lost hours of impressions. Bids are not transparent, don't worry what your competitors bid, instead focus on what each click is worth to you. This current frame of mind is what causes bidding wars, and the main reason why it was eliminated. Hope this helps
You guys were really generous with your answers.... thanks a million! I am no longer angry with the bidding process. Ok im off to follow up on your replies.. Karma bubble coming both your directions. r