Bid price / click price?

[david_uk]

After being a publisher I signed up for adwords yesterday. Obviously it's too early to draw any conclusions on if it works for me or not yet. Time will tell.

Anyway, the one interesting thing so far is the disparity between what the bid cost on my keyword is, and what I'm currently getting paid per click on the same keywords. The click price I'm getting is higher than the bid brice on the adsense site by half as much again! Bearing in mind that Google takes a cut, it seems strange to me that I'm getting paid more than the bid price, and was wondering if anyone has any ideas as to why this might be.

[briggidere]

hi david,

The bid price won't necessarily get you in the top spots for any given keyword,just a google minimum bid. The ads shown on your adsense would more likely be the higher paying bids on this keyword, therefore you are getting a share of the highest bidders for this keyword, which can be a lot bigger than your current bid.

Eg.
Positions:
1: paying $2 per click to be here
down to
20: paying $0.25 per click to be here

google might say $0.20 is the minimum bid on this keyword so you can be low in the advertisers for a smaller amount, but it will be the top 4 or so higher paying advertisers that would appear in your adsense ads, if they have opted in to content.

does this answer the question, or have i got the wrong end of the stick?

Briggidere

[david_uk]

Thanks for the reply. I guess I'm still finding my feet still.

I think my question probably boils down to "Is my site being specifically targetted by advertisers willing to spend money for customers?"

It seems that I'm getting a lot more per click that the going rate for the keywords, so I'm rather hoping that certain of my regular advertisers like me, and have singled me out for attention. Unfortunately I don't think I'll ever know!

[briggidere]

i'm not sure that your site is being targeted by advertiser in that way. it means that you have got targetted content, triggering these higher paying advertiser adverts on your site by google, therefore more wonga from clicks on these ads than you may pay for the traffic in the first place.

Your content must be targetted well to do this, and if you have found that you can bring in PPC traffic and still make +£$ then you have hit a sweet spot. If you have a bit of cash, and ppc is working, go for it.

briggidere

[inbound]

Arbitrage - nice if you can make it work (but annoys some people intensely).

I'd guess that it's very unusual to see a site that earns revenue soley from Adsense being able to turn a positive ROI from Adwords. However, if you can bid low and get traffic it is worth a try.

Also, try to think of more specific words which are related to the content of particular pages on your site (pages that you think people will then click an advert on once they have scanned the content). More specific = less cost per click but highly relevant visitors (but less of them than the big terms).

Good luck with it.