For those who were suddenly faced with huge minimum bids to appear on the search network when the quality score filter went live at the back end of last year, have you in anyway seen the bids drop over the last few months.
I was advised by Google that to see a drop in minimum bid I would have to improve the quality of the content on the page. To date pages where I have significantly improved content haven't seen the minimum bid drop. (by that I mean from say $1 a click to anything under 50 cent - ideally 10 cent but that was back in the good old days)
Has anyone else taken time to improve some of their pages and seen the minimum bid acutally drop by a decent amount?
Just curious!
I was advised by Google that to see a drop in minimum bid I would have to improve the quality of the content on the page.
Perhaps even more important is to make sure that your keywords and ads are brilliantly targeted to each other.
In other words, if you offer a product or service, use keywords that exactly describe that product or service. Then, when a user searches on a particular keyword of yours, make sure they see a well written ad about exactly that thing.
And, of course, it's also to your advantage to send them to a page about that same thing as well. If you do, they're more likely to do business with than if they have to search your site for what they've already searched for once.
AWA
My problem is that if the ad is converting really well on the content network I don't want to risk decreasing the CTR in attempt to lower the bids needed to appear on the search network.
I guess if it were possible to define content or search traffic per ad as it is per campaigns I could have the same keyword in two different adgroups - one for content and one for search. Not sure if this is feasible or allowed? I always thought once a keyword is used in an adgroup that was it, it couldn't be used elsewhere.
As I write this I wonder if there is a opportunity where even traffic from content has been zero or very poor. I could write non sales copy, but instead write a summary of the info they will find on the destination url. Would Google spot this and reward with low minimum bids for search. Has anyone tried this - is this what is meant by making sure the ad and site really relate to each other. I might experiment on this.
I've been able to get minimum bids down doing that but not by making changes to a keyword, ad copy, landing page combo already setup.
Buy the keyword, put the keyword in the ad copy, make sure the exact keyword appears at least once on the landing page and try setting this up in a new ad group so the AdWords page crawler re-scans the page.
Makes it sound like each adgroup only gets a single "crawl".
My experience has been similar.
It can't be to Google's advantage to now have many more times the amount of adgroups to track because of failed experiments.
It's also foolish for the spider to expect to find every keyword used on a page. There are many synonyms for products that I sell. To use them all in copy (or even META tags if they're considered) will simply lead to contrived pages made to please the crawler, not the consumer.
Should we also do some mis-spelling stuffing or simply work the poor language into the page?
Add to this the scenario where 10 cents was fine a few months ago and now 100 times that amount is expected for a keyword to show suggests that so many of our pages were woefully inadequate until the "Quality Score" was introduced. Certainly that wasn't the case.
BTW, not geting on your case, eWhisper. Your suggestion is the same one I've been forced to follow. Managed to go a few years with only a handful of deleted Adgroups. Now they're similar in number to the live ones.
Once tweaking an ad, bid, keyword list or some combo of those was enough to turn things around. Now Adwords is like a pencil without an eraser.
Israel
Makes it sound like each adgroup only gets a single "crawl".
Definitely can't confirm that but it sure seems about right.
AWA - you talk about offering a product or service, but if someone is not offering a paid service I believe it can be very difficult if not impossible to achieve affordable bids in competitive niches.
I have tried creating a few new adgroups with just one keyword but have found these to ask for the same high minimum bids. I certainly don't won't to litter my adwords account with reduntant adgroups in the hope of striking lucky. I think on my luck to date it could prove a very frustrating experience.
