Keywords Inactive - Active Prices Sky Rocket

Originally active at $.10-.20 now most of the related keywords are $1-5

[AssertiveWD]

This happened over the last few hours. I have just started to market with my new account and then this happened. Why would the prices be one thing and then get jacked up. Would it be site "quality?" Thats the only thing I would think that would make them change something. The search term is based around keywords related to "loans" so it does have pretty stiff competition.

[AssertiveWD]

Apparently everyone started to advertise as soon as they saw the current market rates for loans...thats about the closest I could figure for the enormous jump in min bids

[Widestrides]

I have had a similar experience.

I started some new keywords around a new and very well-known product just introduced this week. (Any guesses?)

Anyway, as the searches ramp up on this new word and new phrase, Google seemed to notice and they kept increasing the minimum bid.

But their algo needs some fine tuning, because they completely knocked ALL ads off the page! So now they are getting ZERO ads on this very hot product on most if not all of the relevant keywords.

So, it was a good lesson in how Google is sticking it to advertisers on hot keywords. But the algo runs amuck and defeats the whole purpose as they knock everybody out and they are making ZERO dollars on those hot keywords. The organic SERPS listings will clean up! Good for them. I'm there too, but down a ways.

Greedy Google. Time to tweak the algo!

[lyricsandbook]

This exact thing just happened to me... and I am NOT doing anything involved with interest rates.

I just dove into ad words, and here's how things went for me.

Got the site up Jan 11, 2008. Dove into adwords the next Tuesday or Wednesday.

First - I put up the ad and used Google's optimizer. For this site, I'm not interested in spending a huge amount. I figured on spending $50 a month. Click-throughs were costing about 60 cents.

One thing I realized was that I was getting a more general audience, not really who could purchase the product. So, I switched over to a very specific ad. The only people clicking on my ad should be folks who might end up purchasing my product. I don't want just general browsers interested in this industry.

Next day, I switched over to setting bids per word.

Day one. I set the bids at 10 cents per word. I did well. Woke up in the morning to see that my best keywords had been raised to 20 cents. I adjusted.

Day two. Still good action. Woke up the next morning to see that my best words were now at 40 cents. I adjusted my bids again.

Day three. Still getting clicks. Minimum bid up to 60 cents, and even ALL of my lower scoring words had been raised to 50. Still hit my budget.

Day four. My best keywords are now up to between $1.00 and $5.00?

So... it seems to me that because I wrote an effective ad and targeted it correctly, Google has penalized me for my success.

For now, I have switched over to Yahoo and set my max rate at .25. I'm now getting the same number of visits and actually a better bounce rate then I was with Google.

I was jazzed to try out adwords. This is a new site and I certainly wanted to point people there. However it is not a quick-return kind of business. It just isn't worth it to spend $2.00 for one click-through. I would rather take my chances on the site seeping into the search engines (which it already is) and getting customers organically.