Hi everybody, I am not properly an Adwords Newbie, in fact I used it till 2007 with good results... then, as you know, many things/rules changed by Adwords part etc. So I abandoned it... Now I'm testing a little campaign and I noticed to be the only one that is advertising on that bunch of particular keywords; despite this, the system suggest me to start bidding from $1.50 per click... why? I though I should pay the minimum... 0.01? I'm ready to learn thanks
The system doesn't take into account how many advertisers there is for your keyword or even in the region you are targeting. First, you are never "alone". It may appear you are the only advertiser if you do a search but there are many reasons why you may appear to be the only one. Not all advertisers may advertise in your geography, some may not be advertising at the time you did your search (their decision such as time or day of week, or their budget is exhausted and there are other reasons). The system calculates the minimum based on your QS. What other advertisers are bidding will also affect that calculation. As mentioned, you are not alone and all advertisers, past and present as well as I believe worldwide, are used in the calculation. This even if an advertiser has paused his campaign. So what's happening is that, based on your current QS (which is primarily a comparison of your CTR vs the CTR of others for that keyword), and the bid of your competitors (again, even if their campaign is not running), a minimum is calculated. Of course, if there are a high percentage of paused campaigns, that will skew the result. Now as long as you don't get the message "rarely shown because of poor QS", and there really is not that many competitors, if you bid below the first page minimum, your ads should still show. It's not a minimum to pay (unlike the old days) but the minimum calculated to be on the first page. You could try different strategies and see what happens to both your position and costs. Myself, I usually bid a bit more than the minimum. The idea is to gather data and as quickly as possible. I can lower the bid later and see the effects. Others prefer starting low and moving up their bid. In my mind, the problem with this is the data is skewed because your low bid may not show your ads all the time (you may be on the second page). My strategy of course is that you may pay a high price at first and you got to make sure your budget is high enough too so your ads show as often as possible. At least I know how much it would cost right off the bat. But first and foremost, improve your ads to get a QS of at least 7. There's no point in doing all this if your quality is poor.