car rental MyCity
car rental MyCity Mystate
car rental MyCity MS
Where MyCity is an actual medium size city. Nothing I could do would bring the ad up reliably. Plenty of other ads show. (Results depend a bit on the city, e.g. car rental San Francisco vs. car rental Ashland).
So maybe they're outbidding me? I try upping the maximum CPC. The keyword estimator still says "<.01 clicks" with average position "1.0". I go all the way up to $75 per click with no change in the estimator. Overture's keyword estimator shows a paltry 47 hits for "car rental MyCity".
Or are they outbidding me because I have both a USA and Regionally targetted version of the same ad?
This is really confusing me. Can anyone give me an idea what I'm missing? I'm trying to get exposure for a very local operation where national operators have a strong footprint.
NB: I test straight at [google.com...]
For some results it says "Although your ad is showing, it is not ranked high enough to appear on the first page of search results."
But for others, like:
used car BigCity Fakestatename
I get "The clickthrough rate (CTR) for this keyword does not meet the minimum performance requirement.".
I tried bidding on all of:
used car Bigcity BS
used car Bigcity Bigstate
"used car Bigcity Bigstate"
[used car Bigcity Bigstate]
But this did not help.
This is all, of course, for keywords with zero impressions. They've never shown up, so nobody has ever had a chance to click on them. I am I simply locked out?
For the ads that are showing sometimes, but not as often as you'd like, I think your daily budget may be too low.
By the way, if daily budget is in fact the issue, then raising your Max CPC will make your ad show less not more. This is because, if you have the potential to pay $75.00 per click, a given daily budget will go a lot less far than if you are paying $1.00 per click.
Also, make sure that your daily budget is higher than your Max CPC. If it isn't then your ads won't show at all. This is because the potential cost of one click would be higher than your entire daily budget.
Here are the basics concerning daily budget and Max CPC:
* Daily budget directly effects how often your ads will appear, while;
* Max CPC directly effects in what position your ad shows when it does show.
Moving on, and concerning the keywords on which you are getting the message:
"The clickthrough rate (CTR) for this keyword does not meet the minimum performance requirement."
Be sure to check the 'status' column at the Ad Group level of your account. The keywords may be 'on hold' or 'disabled'. It is also possible that there may be a server delay, and the keywords are still showing as 'normal' when they are in fact 'on hold' or 'disabled'. If this is the case, you should see the 'status' column update before too long.
In any case, I think your best answer will come from AdWords support who can actually take a detailed look at the account in question.
AWA
I also found that I had bad estiamtes from the estimator. Turns out I needed a CPC of about $3 on those keywords, where I was down in the sub $0.25 (Which, by the way, is all I'll pay).
I'm advertising a very local business, but am completely spammed by national providers that also cover the same region. Even when user makes a very specific regional query, I get outbid.
Also, you may want to change your keyword matching type. If you change them to exact matches, they may be targeted more. You might not get as many clicks, but those clicks will be people who are looking for exactly what your keyword offers.
Those are just general ideas, mind you.
