Of course, I emailed support. I can't wait to see their boilerplate response.
Had to vent.
Every day, it seems, Adwords is creaming off my best performing (and most relevant) keywords, and making them inactive - or telling me to up my bid. These generally have been triggering my ads in the first 4 rankings, and their CTR was around 4%.
Whilst I'm still finding my way around the 'system', one way I've been dealing with this is to set up a new ad group dedicated to that inactive keyword (then removing it from the previous ad group). Hey presto! That very same keyword suddenly becomes active again in its new environment.
But I do find this a bit of a worry - my product is in a very narrow field, and if AdWords keeps inactivating these highly relevant keywords, I'll end up with none left!
Just because they tell you there's a minimum bid does not necessarily mean that's what you will pay.
If you're paying $0.36 and they inactivate it until you enter a bid of $5.00, you'll still only pay $0.01 more than the advertiser that appears below you in the results. If that advertiser pays $0.35, you'll be shelling out $0.36 ... still.
MaxCPC is not "The" CPC. It's just part of the equation. Give it a little try. Up the bid and re-activate at least one of the terms and see what happens.
Oh ... there's no need to email support about this ... you can just click the link that explains it next to your current (inactive) bid amount. The message you may get from support will be pretty much the same information.
If you're paying $0.36 and they inactivate it until you enter a bid of $5.00, you'll still only pay $0.01 more than the advertiser that appears below you in the results. If that advertiser pays $0.35, you'll be shelling out $0.36 ... still.
Due to the intricacies of Quality Score, this statement isn't accurate. And, in my experience, a newly set minumum CPC takes these intracacies into consideration making it very likley that the actual CPC will be the minimum CPC (or very close to it) until improvements in CTR or other quality metrics justify otherwise.
Generally it is not until you get some click-thru history, etc, and Google allows you to lower that bid (which they don't let you know, daily trial an error is often the only answer) that you can get that CPC back down to a comfortable level.
All in all, it is a pain in the neck and seemingly unfair policy that Google has a hard time explaining or defending.
Mike
It's been a while that you would be hard-pressed to find positive comments about G, other than from shareholders, anywhere. Meanwhile the competition is gaining ground. Heard a report a couple days ago that a competitors CEO accepted a salary of $1, and the rest in shares. Thats confidence. Don't know how true it is....
Thats confidence.
From Reuters:
"Yahoo is not unique among Silicon Valley companies in deemphasizing salary and linking compensation to company performance in the form of share bonuses. Since 2004, Google Inc., Yahoo's biggest rival, has paid $1 in salary to its top executives -- co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin and CEO Eric Schmidt..."
[biz.yahoo.com...]
