Today I started a new campaign and setup 4 keywords with $0.10 clicks. This worked great, had a CTR of 5.5%, super relevant landing page generating a 7% conversion.
This lasted for about 1 1/2 hours.
Then all of a sudden Google decided my $0.10 max bids weren't good enough, and required me to up my bids to $10. Thats 10,000% more than my current bid. Max PPC I could afford is $0.15 before I start losing money.
I put in other random keywords to see what happened, and every keyword I put in wanted a $10 bid.
What gives?
How can I achieve the ability to run $0.10 ads? If it's a trust issue, how can you possibly even build up trust when $10 will bankrupt me?
Obviously you can have Max PPC's that low because it let me run them for 1 1/2 hours. Does anyone here have any idea how to achieve low PPC?
My landing page is loaded with unique content relevant the the keywords (there is only 4 keywords). There page is linked to the rest of the site (and vice versa), a privacy policy page, and contact page, bounce rate was something along 15%.
70,000 impressions yielded 4,000 click (5.7% CTR)
4,000 clicks yielded 281 sales (7.08% Conversion)
How do you improve upon this? How much more relevant do I have to make it before Google sees it could be a successful ad?
$10 minimum bids indicates there might be a problem with the account quality score as well. How long have you had the account? Do you have other campaigns/ad groups with problematic quality scores?
As far as my account, I have had the account for quite some time (haven't used in probably a year however). The other campaigns on the account are primarily stuff thats been paused for a couple years, and were not heavily used.
Through some tweaking I have managed to get the min bids down the $1.00 to $0.50 range, but that is still to high and will yield losses.
For the time being I am forced to rely on Yahoo and MSN ads because the product is holiday oriented (valentines day) and will be useless to figure this out tomorrow.
If you where promoting a product someone else is. It's possible a competitor has played a dirty trick and made a duplicate advert pointing to the same URL but has bid ridiculousy high. Sometimes Google will slap the wrong person, that is, you and not the duplicator. The competitor does it in hope to push you out and keep you out until later when he simply activates his own ads again and reaps a competitorless market.
Affiliates are particularly susceptible to this.
I somehow doubt it has happened to you. But if it has and you found out who pushed you out, just give google an email and they'll return things to normal
Wow, I am impressed that your managed to bring your bids down to this range after being hit by the USD 10 slap. This shows that it was not really a penalty but maybe some other issue with lack of history' etc.. If you keep at it, you should get your bids down to much lower levels. However the process may take upto a month to forty days and you will have to spend some money...
If it was for Valentine day.. then you maybe out of luck. Unfortunately G , no longer allows 'new' accounts with little history to ramp up quickly. This seems to be an anti -get rich quick measure.. initiated by them.
Types of websites that will be penalized with low landing page quality scores:Data collection sites that offer free gifts, subscription services etc., in order to collect private information
Arbitrage sites that are designed for the sole purpose of showing ads
Malware sites that knowingly or unknowingly install software on a visitor's computer
( ... )
The following types of websites are likely to merit low landing page quality scores and may be difficult to advertise affordably. In addition, it's important for advertisers of these types of websites to adhere to our landing page quality guidelines regarding unique content.
eBook sites that show frequent ads or install malware
'Get rich quick' sites
Comparison shopping sites
Travel aggregators
Affiliates that don't comply with our affiliate guidelines
