4 bucks a click

but no competitors - finding a solution?

[chewy]

I'm running a new campaign with thousands of phrases in it.

Most of them are verb or noun words modified with state and town type descriptive words. It could be some of these single words are bid up quite high, but no one seems to be bidding on our specific combinations.

I find a few phrases that show up for me as position #1, with zero competition -- and of course I would like to bid these lower.

Is there a winning way to do this without manually downgrading each phrase after looking it up on the SERP?

I could do this manually if there were just a few words but somehow I expect that quality score factors will apply here.

[netmeg]

You're getting hit by QS, and it sounds like you might be using DKI? That's probably going to be problematic - your keywords have to be very tightly focused to your ad, and unless you want to write an ad for every keyword, I'm not sure how you're going to recover that.

[chewy]

not using DKI yet -

are you are saying by modifying the landing pages with the terms, the click will drop from 3 bucks to something like 25 cents automatically? I guess I need to do that if this is correct.

this account has many terms still in the 100 impressions, zero clicks phase, and because there are so many terms, there are plenty that are clicked, and converting.

QS applies within the first 10 clicks on a term?

[netmeg]

Not the landing pages - the ad text. (I'm assuming this is a Search campaign) QS applies immediately, and regardless of clicks or conversions. It may bounce around for a few weeks, depending on how new your campaign is. But it sounds like you might just have too many search phrases and general ads that aren't focused to the specific keywords.

[chewy]

I have taken the phrases that were drawing the most fire and put them in keyword focused groups with adverts with those words in them just today.

Since the account is 3 months old, does that help at all?

I feel silly asking all these questions...so thanks for your quick answers.

Other than hanging out here and asking a million more questions (and learning by doing), are there any good (up to date) guides I can study to more fully understand the situation?

[KiskaSF]

yes, it will help. You can also use keyword insertion tool. This will pull up whatever keyword the user searches (it has to be in your list of words).

Example:

Your Ad: Find {keyword: Race Cars} Here
Your keywords:
Blue Cars
Red Cars
Green Cars

Ad on Google will look like this if I look for Blue Cars:

Find Blue Cars Here

If the keyword is too long, like: Red and Blue Cars. The ad will display whatever you have in your brackets:

Find Race Cars Here

[chewy]

dki doesn't quite work in this case - I find it renders "Frankentext" eg text put together that isn't quite right and looks like a monster.

we're working on some other ways to do it dki so it flows naturally - but the big deal for me is understanding this QS thing without having to pay big dough on a per click basis.

[tomasvdb]

if you ads and keywords and landing pages are all very relevant, the only thing left to do is make sure your click through rate is as high as possible. The higher your CTR (ideally 10%+) the quicker your minCPCs will drop.
I've had QS score go from poor to Great within a few days without making any changes. the only thing i had to do was endure high CPCs for a few days to prove that my keywords/ads WERE relevant and got high CTRs.

[chewy]

tomas -

very helpful - thanks.

Does this mean it takes a couple of clicks a day over a couple of days - or hundreds of clicks per day?

[chewy]

on average, over the last 5 days, the CPC has gone up on all campaigns - with the exception of the newly targeted one.

this one has 20 clicks per day -

does QS start to apply in 2 days with this volume of clicks?

[arizonadude]

Google must be trying to lower their profit this quarter by driving sites to advertise elsewhere.

Can't wait until MSN buys Yahoo and puts Google in their place.

Good affiliate sites with great unique content are not good enough for the goog. I would bet if all the affiliates that advertise on adwords yanked their ads, googs stock would take a little dip when they report their earnings.

They have become to big and no longer care about the types of sites and webmasters that put them on the map. I understand the quality score but give me a break.

Come on Icahnn!