Bidding on a Term that returns no Organic Results

[agentalpha]

So I know this may sounds weird, but my client wants to run an ad on a term that current returns no Google results. I've setup the ad, but currently it will only show up to the right of the "Your search did not match any documents" message. My client wants it to display across the top in the yellow section. I've tried enabling position preference but that doesn't seem to work. I know this is possible because I played around with some random searches and got it to appear for the query "asdjdfgiojdfg ebay". Any ideas? Thanks!

[Rehan]

You'll need to look into the top placement formula. Start here:
[adwords.blogspot.com...]

[agentalpha]

I would be the only one bidding on this keyword so I wouldn't think that the new top placement formula should have that much of an effect.

[RhinoFish]

if there ad, keyword and content is relevant and their site quality is good...

[agentalpha]

They are using a vanity url, say pickmywidget.com, for a marketing campaign. So they want to have an ad show up when someone enters 'pickmywigit' as one word. The something like:
Widget Company
Learn more about our widgets
www.pickmywidget.com

Within AdWords account the quality score is appearing as Great. The minimum bid is high enough and so is the max bid. Like I said before no one else is bidding on this term.

[limoshawn]

I believe that you’re going to need to raise your minimum bid to satisfy the "top placement formula". Even though there are no other advertisers G still wants to make a certain amount for the top spots.

On another note, if you have a term that returns no organic results it seems to me that it would only take a couple of good links with the term in the anchor text to get that page to show up in the organic results. If I read correctly, you’re trying to promote a vanity domain which leads me to believe that there is a more prominent domain behind it. I would suggest using the influence of the main site to throw some links to the vanity site. You can bet that your competitors will be trying to rank organically for that term. ;)

[agentalpha]

I don't think you can change the min bid since it's set by Google but I can change my Max CPC which I increased to $20 just to test and still no luck. I did add some links from their main site to the vanity site so hopefully that will be indexed shortly and there will be an organic result as well. I'm curious to see if the ad behavior changes once there is something listed organically.

[limoshawn]

Max CPC, you're correct that's what I meant. As for the top placement formula I believe that your click-thru rate plays a role in your top placement along with your CPC. If you’re not getting any clicks the test searches you have done will give you a bad CTR.

Also, I don't think that raising your max CPC will have an instant effect, you may have to give it a little time to move.

Also, also, be sure that you are checking on the ad with the ad preview tool as this will give you a view of what the rest of the world sees.

[AdWordsAdvisor]

Essentially, ads are only eligible to appear in the top spots if they exceed a certain quality threshold. This is true regardless of the number of competitors one has for a keyword.

Here's more information on "top placement" from the AdWords Help Center:

[adwords.google.com...]

AWA