Keyword bid price shot up 20000%

Keyword price went up a lot on one of my campains. Why?

[Raid]

I am quite new to AdWords, so I'm taking it slow. I have one campaign with two ads running using only two keywords. The keywords' minimum bid was $.05 per click for the past two days. Suddenly, a few hours ago the ads stopped, and the keywords said they were inactive. AdWords recommended I increase the quality or raise the bid to $10 on one keyword and $5 on the other. These are cheap keywords, and there is only one other ad displaying when they are searched. What happened?

[Green_Grass]

You got hit by Low Quality Score.

Do a site search on Quality Score to understand the issues involved.

[eljefe3]

Yep, you got hit. Usually this just effects a unique URL, so if you ahve another URL you can use, you should see the lower bids for the new URL.

[Raid]

Thanks everyone. I did the research you suggested. Clearly the quality score destroyed me. Looking at my campaign with new eyes, I can't imagine how I could have made it much worse for Google's QS. My ad copy and URL didn't contain any of the keywords. My landing page was just a blank page that had a PHP include of my affiliate link, which in-turn redirected to the sales site.

I'm also hearing that it's better to go into AdWords full bore, with a decent size campaign, lots of keywords, and several ads. Oh well, live and learn. I feel like my head is going to explode.