Meaning, I am not sure where to draw the line.
I have no doubts that we can out bid them, no doubts at all. I have upper management wanting us to be #1 for certain keywords, but when the cost starts eating away at the revenue I get concerned. So right now, I feel like I have been waging a costly war all week and while we are winning, its getting old having to hunt keywords down, constantly up bids etc.
By any chance would any one happen to know if there is a tool out there that can send me an email alert whenever ad positions change? Or even better, a tool that incorporates all major PPC engines in to one accouns and also send me alerts when things are going amiss? I know of search center, but have not heard of any more. Or better yet, perhaps there is a way in AdWords to alert me when my ad position drops?
Not sure how u determine it is only one person causing the price increase but I will tell you this Google loves those foolish battles...
You *can* bid for position - if you really really want to.
If I find I'm in a bidding war, I now try to back off immediately - find new (maybe longer tail) keywords that my competition isn't using yet, and also work on my organics.
As my grandpappy used to say - don't get into a p****ng contest with a skunk; nobody ends up smelling very good.
I agree backing off is a good thing, but when it cuts in to our revenue, we are almost forced to react by raising bids.
I almost forgot, I am only speculating, but its kind of like this, I up a bid stay at number 1, wait for about 5 hours and then they are number 1, do it all over again and its the same thing. This is happening on several keywords. Thats how i suspect it is one company. There are other things that make me beleive this too, but I wont talk about that here.
Raising the bids as well cuts into the revenue. I would suggest this
make a better ad make your landing page more descriptive to match the ad and if you do then even if your outbid the adwords bot can still place your bid above the rest of the pack.
You have to be willing to put some time into the account other than the easiest way raising the bid. This is the easy way out. Try lower your bid optimize the landing page better build a better more descriptive ad and see what happens might be suprised what this will do.... and maybe save ya some money to get a raise with....
Dont get me worng, I knew this bidding war was coming and that is why we are sort of prepared for it. For 2 months working on various landing pages, lowering overall account costs and so on, we knew it was going to happen because we saw the writing on the wall in the spring with the strategies they deployed.
Now we are faced with a situation to up the bids. I do agree with you, everyone should be doing more to counter these kind of issues besides upping the bid and I wish that I could do that, but I have spent a couple of hundred hours getting ready for this, and while I know we will be the last ones standing when its all done, I just wish Google could be a little more helpful when it comes to alerts. Manual reports, are a pain when your dealing with thousands of keywords. :(
Just the same though, you offer solid advice that many could benefit from when it comes to reacting to bidding wars.
I have had this work for me. Of course if they are on 24/7 with the higher bid
it doesn't work. Also take your best keyword and fit it into several long tails
keywords. Also explore the negative approach. Good Luck...KF
In a bidding war there are no winners!
Except Google!...KF
[edited by: King_Fisher at 3:31 am (utc) on Oct. 20, 2007]
This is my current stategy and it is working, I noticed that they started to back down on some terms, but not all.
I suspect they are trying to regroup and really focus on the most important terms they have and abandon the ad position on the others.
It would make sense because they are the under dogs in this one as we have the funds to go the distance for a long time. So it's kind of expected to see them abandon fighting multiple fronts and drawing a line of defense by upping bids on big money terms because they just lowered the bids on less important terms.
It is very interesting to see, but it makes me nervous to see .30 to 1.00 spikes in CPC. I will say that I have a feeling it is going to be over by next week. I know what we are paying and I know our CTR and quality is historically better, so if i am paying and have more funds available, they are feeling it too, which is one thing my boss want them to deal with.
I have to say it was funny, I told him it was going to get expensive and his response was, as long as we still have a good roi keep going because I want to see them pay. lol, thats agressive marketing.
