Being charged more than max bid for clicks

[La_Valette]

This is not supposed to happen. I set the content bids for some adgroups to x and I'm being charged y instead, where y > x.

[edited by: La_Valette at 9:19 pm (utc) on April 20, 2008]

[SEMblahblah]

well..i myself am trying to find an answer to this!but whn i didn't get one..i presumed tht i had set the bids in cpm mode and had forgotten to change them to cpc for a while!

[RhinoFish]

using budget optimizer?

[jim2003]

I had a similar experience. Then I noticed that I had set a higher bid for 1 of the words in the ad group. This seemed to supercede the "content" bid I had set. Which seemed wierd to me, but I just turned content off and didn't investigate further.

[smallcompany]

Preferred position?

[NatronZero]

I've only seen people say this in high volume campaigns where specific KWs were given their own max CPC. I personally inherited a few campaigns where I saw this and as soon as I changed my adwords filter, I found specific KWs getting less volume, but for a CPC that was able to skew results. Please let the community know what is going on here. :)
n.

[SEMblahblah]

hmm...so quite a few people have experienced it!
I'm still looking for a much more convincing answer to this problem!

[AdWordsAdvisor]

In the many cases in the past in which I have looked into this complaint for an advertiser, I have (so far) always found there to be a explanation other than a system issue.

Several of these explanations have been mentioned here - with the most common in my experience being individual keywords to which the advertiser has given a Max CPC setting higher than the default for the ad group. This individual setting always trumps the default setting.

IMO, it's best to address this concern directly to the AdWords support team, as they can look at the account and get to the bottom of things - whereas here, well, we're just guessing. ;)

AWA

[wanderer1985]

I have experienced this a few times.

Once I found out that the reason for this anomaly was that I had individual keyword level bids which were much higher than the adgroup bid (which was my mistake)

The other time this happened was for a placement targeting campaign. The max cpc bid for a particular site in that campaign was set as 15 and the average cpc I got was 19. This was definitely not my mistake. Also the campaign was in cpc bidding strategy. So, the issue of getting clicks at higher cpc earlier would not be the case here.

[La_Valette]

I've read through the possible explanations people listed here. None of them apply to my case. No cpm bids, no individual keyword bids, no preferred position, no budget optimizer. Was a simple content bid set to x, and was charged y > x.

And the other thing which happened is that after I paused the adgroups in question while I tried to figure out what was going on, they continued running and generating clicks.