General vs Specific Terms

[pinkstor]

I'm confused about something with AdWords, and I know this is the place to get it answered! Let's say there's a search phrase "birthday gift". That's going for $1.00 per click to be #1. There's the more specific phrase "birthday gift idea" going for $0.50 per click to be #1. Then I want to bid on the phrase "1st birthday gift idea" at $0.20 per click to be #1. So if a searcher searches for "1st birthday gift idea", who's #1? I'm a newbie at PPC, so I might be missing something very obvious...

[cabowabo]

If you want that phrase, then you will have to bid on it. Don't make the mistake of driving all the PPC traffic to your home page. Make landing pages specific for the PPC traffic to maximize your ROI.

CaboWabo

[pinkstor]

Hey, thanks for the reply, but I think my question was confusing - let me restate it. Let's assume this scenario with keyword phrases and bid amounts:

"birthday gift" at $1.00/click
"birthday gift idea" at $0.50/click
"1st birthday gift idea" at $0.20/click

All those bid amounts are high bids for those phrases (for this example). So, here's my question. What happens if someone searches for "1st birthday gift idea"? Which one comes up as the top ad? The most specific ad, or the highest bidder?

[buckworks]

Remember that ad positions depend on everyone's clickthrough rates as well as their bid prices. I don't think Adwords is automatically biased towards more specific terms, but if your campaign is well-crafted the CTR on your specific term should be higher than the CTR on someone else's more general terms. You could get past them that way even if their bids were higher than yours.

[eWhisper]

AWA wrote a nice detailed post a while ago about the Ad Rank formula, post 11:
[webmasterworld.com...]

Specific words are also good because even though you have broadmatched a word, Google might not be showing the broadmatch, or phrase match versions of that word:
[webmasterworld.com...] post 19.