Need Adwords Pro to Answer.

[chickenpaw]

I have finally got my landpage quality high as I have seen my MIN BID go from 40 cents to 4 cents. However to any clicks I have to run my bids very high....

I know for a fact a competitor of mine gets first page position for around .15/CPC , I have to pay .95 CPC for same position or lower..

How exactly is this possible? How do I get frontpage position like that for cheap?

[magicdan]

I think it mostly boils down to the advertiser who will ultimately lead to the best CPM for Google. So if you get a high % of clicks to impressions (good ctr) on your ad then for every 1000 impressions Google will earn more from you than another advertiser with a lower CTR paying the same bid.

With all this quality score stuff in there now, its hard exactly whether this will be enough. The fact you have a low minbid is a good sign, but you probably need to encourage more ctr in the first instance then once you have some history, slowly drop the bid price and see how far you can drop it until you lose position. You might also need to bid higher for a while to get enough traffic to effectively prove that the ad will get good ctr though.

[QualityNonsense]

In my experience, cuts in CPC to reflect increased CTR/quality score can take time to filter through. If memory serves, your keyword quality scores are calculated on the last 1000 keyword impressions. By that logic, if you're getting 100 impressions/day on a keyword, presumably it'd take 10 days for the impact to be seen.

[johnser]

Adgroup history.

EG - If I have an adgroup that has an avg CTR of 20% over the last 3 years & I put a new KW in it, chances are I'm going to pay far less for a good position than someone bidding for this KW in a brand new a/c.

History is the key to Google - and that means times & money