Different question about minimum bid thresholds

[JBrown]

Has anyone seen a mimimum bid between $.50 and $1? Same for $1 and $5.

I've never seen a minimum bid of $.75 or $1.50. It seems odd that you go from $.50 to $1 to $5.

It would be much more helpful if there were $.10 increments up to $1 and $.50 increments up to $5.

We have a small, but significant number of keywords where the minimum bid is $1. These keywords convert well and are relevant, but we don't have the resources to create tons of seperate landing pages so the QS does suffer a bit. In many cases, $1 is a bit too high, but $.70 or $.80 would work quite well.

The same applies to $5 keywords on occasion. There are times we could bid $1.50 or $2, but this is rarely possible for keywords with minimums that jump from $1 right to $5.

[chinara]

I personally observed (recently) min bids:

.01
(.02) i don't really remember if i have any of these.
.03
.04
.05
.10
.15
.20
.30
.40
.50
$1.00
$5.00
$10.00

in US $

A long time ago: 2005 i think
.5
.06
.07
.10

[redstar08]

I've found that if your click through rate (CTR) on your ads is too low, then Google will raise the minimum bid. So if you want to lower the minimum bid required, raise your CTR by writing better ads.

Also, I've found that ads using {Keyword: Alt Title} in the title text do better since it places the keywords in the title.

[JBrown]

Redstar, I'm aware of both of those things and do them extensively. Still, I'll occasionally get high minimum bids for keywords with a decent CTR. The landing pages are relevant, but they don't always include the keywords in question.

I'm more surprised that Google's sophisticated system doesn't have more complex gradients for minimum bids. Going from $.50 to $1.00 to $5.00 with no steps in between seems a rather blunt way to address this problem.

Maybe I'll add this to the 'things I'd like to see' queue.