Google is just GREEDY

County Government Bidding

[metakomm]

Google is giving one of my clients, a county government, with a unique county name that NO ONE bids on, minimum bids of $0.50.

I am only bidding on the name of the county and it's services and directing them to a landing page that is clearly the county and discusses the services.

so all my keyword have the county name. that's it.

google's silly algo decides right off the jump the keywords are poor with no data to back up it is a poor quality keyword in regards to CTR...

keep it up google...this is the a huge county government and if i have to report nonsense like this, good luck at getting $$$$$$$$ out them.

to pay $.50 on a keyword that is unique that no one bids on and is totally relevant is absurb.

[metakomm]

let me also add that some keywords increased in cost within 4 hours...google needs to get the hell outta here with that nonsense...

[netmeg]

If nobody's bid on that keyword before, and your client has no prior AdWords history, then it can take a while for the bids to sort out. I've seen it take up to a week or more. Set the bids to where you want them to be, and leave it alone; odds the quality score will sort itself out and the terms will automatically go active. And in the meantime, manage your client's expectations and tell them it may take a week or two (or even more) to get the campaign running in good order.

[DamonHD]

G seems specifically to be attempting to squash the "want it NOW" way of "working" of the get-rich-quick crowd by making sudden changes expensive.

Do as netmeg suggests and give it a while.

Rgds

Damon

[metakomm]

yeah, i am doing what you are saying...but when you client is testing an dyou have a small budget, this makes things shaky...the good news is that I am getting double digit CTR...

[DamonHD]

You can probably get the right price and right budget (and as netmeg says set (close to) the price you want since G seems to sample even at lower bids)...

But you have to ...wait... Patience is an asset that scammers often do not have and cannot buy...

Rgds

Damon

[metakomm]

i was hoping to get the .05/click to deliver the most traffic possible on a keywords that are completely relevant and be able to claim tons of visitors for this campaign...

my reports will start off not looking as good...lol...but then again, i can report that through optimization i reduced keywords from .50/click to hopefully .04/click...lol

that is one negative i can turn into a positive...

[netmeg]

Absolutely. When I started a brand new campaign for myself with keywords that as far as I could tell, nobody else was bidding on, Google wanted minimums of $.20 and $.30 for almost all thousand of them. I set my two most important keywords to .20, and all the rest to .10. After three or four days, most of the minimum bids went down to .10. Then I set my five or six most important keywords to ten cents, and reduced all the others to .05. I kept going in this fashion, and by the end of 14 to 20 days, I had 80% of the keywords ACTIVE with a QS of GREAT at .02 and .03. The rest are set to .03 and .04, and every few days a few more of them turn active as well.

[chinara]

I see min bids jumping for new compaigns every day now, sometimes more than 5 times a day,

One of my compaign jumped from ok .10 to poor .50 to great .02 to ok .20 then to great .05 then to ok .10 and so forth then to .10 then to .05 then to .10.

Where is the logic? GOOGLE your quality ALGO SUCKS!
I see the parked domains still in the results and all kinds of garbidge - get your sh&t togerther!

This is extremely annoying. Google give us the damn answer is landing page of quality to you or not. Stop jerking us around.

[metakomm]

great. several keywords had a price jump AGAIN - some to $1...even though yesterday i had double digit CTR....

[metakomm]

hmmm..let the $1 keywords sit with a max CPC of $.50...i noticed someone was bidding on the keyword that was super irrelevant...

their ad is gone, mine is back with a min CPC of $.40.

My guess that what could be a part of the CPC to decrease for me without doing anything but waiting?

The little history I have made the keyword look like it was poor quality.

My price goes up.

I stop bidding on the keyword.

Someone else bids on that key word, is far more irrelevant, racks about 3 or 4 thousand impressions, has a terrible CTR, much, much lower than mine, and the price goes up for him, goes down for me.

In other words, perhaps less relevant people drive down the cost for more relevant people, in regards to keyword quality and min CPC.

So basically, I want these other irrelevant ads to be run, which makes my CTR rate look more and more legit and relevant.

If I am doing 6%, and everybody else is doing .50%, the algo better give me points to being more relevant more deserving of a better QS...And lowering my barrier for entry to resume bidding...

So perhaps, could it be a trick to open a separate account and run non-relevant ads? lol

[netmeg]

My guess that what could be a part of the CPC to decrease for me without doing anything but waiting?

Just waiting has worked out really well for me. Of course, with my established accounts, I was used to having things go up with a great QS immediately, so it took some attitude adjustment on my own part (and I am not patient by nature) but that really seems to work for new accounts / new campaigns that have no history to fall back on. I just put in what *I* want to pay, and wait for the QS to come to me. I might raise the levels on a couple of keywords, just to get traffic flowing and some history racking up, but only one or two.

So far, it's worked every time, but sometimes it takes as much as 3 weeks to a month.

I tend to doubt this would work on established accounts that have suddenly lost QS, though.