I have been using keywords on the variations of spellings for the domain i am promoting. Clicks were .05 now they are .30 to $1.00 and there are no other advertisers! It even says "below first page bid!"
My relavancy score is 5/10 or 6/10 for all these keywords. My ads are very targeted to the keywords.
What am I doing wrong? this is frusterating, if they want me to advertise, why do they do this?
Check your ad text
Check your landing page
Check your quality score
You will have some insight into rising costs.
Based on what you have written, numbersguy, you are are almost certainly speaking of an increasing first page bid estimate.
Assuming that is the case, it is important to know that he first page bid estimate for a keyword is not highly related to how many (or how few) competitors an advertiser has for the keyword. Instead, it is more heavily related to the Quality Score of the keyword as it is used in the individual advertiser's account.
By the way, when you encounter keywords for which there are no (or very few) competitors, it does not necessarily mean that no one has thought of using that keyword and it is thus a great opportunity to advertise cheaply.
In fact it often means exactly the opposite: that the advertisers who have used it in the past have found it difficult to keep it running affordably (due perhaps to a lack of 'commercial intent' on the part of those searching on the keyword) and have decided to stop using it.
As an aside, this topic is covered on this page from the AdWords Help Center:
Why is my first page bid high if there are no ads showing?
[adwords.google.com...]
AWA
Why is my first page bid high if there are no ads showing?Print
[adwords.google.com...]
AWA
As first page bid is an average for all GEOs, sometimes it's not a very accurate number for national advertisers.
First page bids exist to give bid guidance. Previously, many advertiser's didn't know that min bids were not bid guidance suggestions; and first page bids did a good job of helping to fill part of that role.
For those of us who understood the difference, min bids would be nice to see for a variety of reasons.
If I lower my bid to under $1.00 then Google says the ads are not showing. My CTR doesn't seem to make much of a difference at all. I have ads with a CTR of 100%. Yes, they aren't shown often but when they do I always get a click. Mostly because that ad has no competition and the search results Google shows organically doesn't match what the user is searching for. Still, I have to pay over $1.00 for that click.
I have no idea why Google treats small businesses like this.
The only reason I came come up with is this. Google knows that a long tail phrase contains a keyword that is profitable. Other businesses pay a lot for clicks for words used in the phrase. So Google hikes the cost for clicks on long tail keywords that contain those hot single words.
So maybe this is what is happening to you?
You have a lot to learn about how Google treats small businesses. They treat us quite badly. No human phone support, emails get bot( automated) responses. Impossible or very difficult to get thru. to a human. Almost impossible to get an intelligent reply that addresses the specific problem.. etc etc .. frustrating.. Just going thru. this process so ranting in this thread.
I also have keywords where the $1.00 bid places the ad at the top of the page horizontally, and that keyword has a high CTR without any other ads.
This keyword doesn't get many impressions. Maybe 2 a day.
Google shows a small button beside that keyword, and when I click the button it shows a popup adviser window. It tells me that if I raise my bid to $8.00 that I would get 300 impressions per day.
This really frustrates me, because no other ads are showing for that long tail phrase. Why should I have to pay more for more impressions when my CTR is really high (like 90%).
Also, if you go to the Google Adwords Keyword Tool, and enter the phrase. It reports that the phrase has a total of 110 searches globally per month.
So how can I get 800 impressions a day by increasing my bid to $8.00?
You can't seem to trust any numbers presented by Google.
