Minimum Bid Issue

[ForeGolf81]

Hello everyone,
Recently we set up a brand new Adwords account for a site we had recently launched. It has been a while since we set up a brand new adwords account so I was expecting everything to go smoothly and the account to start directing traffic to our site, however we got slapped with an extremely high minimum bid for each keyword we entered into the account. It should be noted we are only trying to bid on keywords relevant to our site as well as trying to direct them to the specific page about the keyword on our site.

Just as a test we placed a bid for our URL {www.oursite.com}, the results were a quality rank of 3 with a first page bid minimum $1.00 and keyword relevance "poor". Has G started some sort of policy to make it harder for new adwords accounts to succeed? Is there anyway we can either increase our quality rank without having to bid these high amounts?

As a side note we also had another website on a similar topic and placed some of the same keywords in this account and started receiving traffic for under .10 cents per click so I know it is not because the keywords we have bid on are highly competitive, it seems like we are just encountering this issue because our account is new.

Thank you.

[netmeg]

I wish there were an honest and easy answer for you. Unfortunately AdWords has gotten pretty complicated for the average business owner to just jump in.

Some general guidelines - first of all, turn off the Display Network. If you decide you want to advertise there, then make SEPARATE campaigns that are Display Network only and Search only. Everything is completely different between the two networks, from bidding to reporting, so it makes sense to keep them separate. Google will not tell you that, but the people who do AdWords for a living will, every time.

When you've got a handle on the Search, THEN you can go in and start working with Display.

Next, make sure your organization is really tight. Start small and work your way up. Every single keyword in an adgroup has to be 100% relevant to every single ad. If necessary, take it down to only a few keywords per ad group, and write one or two ads very specifically to that keyword. That's the way to bring up the quality scores. If there's even one marginal keyword, or one on a slightly different theme (although still relevant to your site, maybe not so much to your ad) that can throw it off.

This forum is a great resource, but you're going to take some time and use the search function. Most of what you're asking is here, because it's been asked over and over, but you have to go looking for it.

Good luck!

[ForeGolf81]

Thanks for the reply and advice. We did realize within a couple of days to turn off the Display Network after a few days when we noticed we were getting a very low click through rate from it so we only show for Google Search now.

We tried to make it as tight as we could, we actually have one of the campaigns set up to hit only long tails for our industry. Each adgroup has only one ad and one keyword. We did set up each keyword to be what I believe is called broad match by putting a "+" in front of each word in the long tail like "+keyword1 +keyword2 +keyword3", could this be something that is making our quality score go down?

I know the CTR has something to do with raising the quality score, but how can you raise your CTR if google won't show your ads?

Thanks again for the responses.

[smallcompany]

Keyword match should not affect the QS, that's per Google.

If you want to start "tight", then you go with exact match first. Broad match can be misleading, even if you use it with the "+" sign which BTW was a good thing to do. You don't want your "books" suddenly trigger your ad on the search for "newspaper" or even "toilet paper" (I doubt for the second one but want to be extreme to get your attention).
Once you get your exact match working for you, you replicate it into phrase match (new ad groups). Before even you create ad groups for your phrases, you will make a list of negative match keywords.
For example if you're selling shoes, you don't want "repair shoes" to trigger your ads.

With broad match, even with the "+", you also should use negative keywords.

Then with both phrase and broad match you should regularly use "See all search terms" to see what real terms are triggering your ads so you can incorporate good ones into exact (and phrase and broad), and also to find new negative keywords.

Some of this may be low level advice for you, I apologize if I made it that way.

If you're sure about that you've done all in the best possible way, you can try contacting Google.
Be aware that if you're running any kind of affiliate site, or aggregation for whatever, Google does not like those things unless you can offer something really useful and unique.

Finally, the site you used to test the account may have a prior history with Google AdWords, or it simply is an old trusted site that Google "lets" go through.
Google is tough on "brand new" things, including accounts and web sites.

[ForeGolf81]

I am glad to know the match type will not affect quality score, that at least eliminates one thing I was concerned about.

Thanks for the advice on the match types, we have all of them set to broad right now, I think we will try to do some testing on a few keywords with the exact match to see if that will help us.

Are there any common negative keywords or are they unique to each industry, my guess is they are unique but just thought I would ask as I would like to learn more about that concept.

SmallCompany, no need to apologize at all, we were looking for advice and I find yours very helpful.

I probably will stay away from contacting google, I have had bad outcomes from trying to contact them in the past so we will just continue to work at it and tweak our account.

If I understand your last statement correctly, the sites trust in google is also related to its trust in adwords, so as a site ages we should see the amount of trust in adwords also increase and hopefully receive a lower minimum bid and see more impressions to our keywords, correct?

Thanks again.

[netmeg]

Well I usually add "free" "used" "reconditioned" type words to negatives when I'm dealing in new products.

Run some search query reports and take a look at the strings that are actually coming up for your keywords. Or if you have log analytics, or site search, take a look at those. They'll show you what types searches you don't want to show ads on.

[ForeGolf81]

Thanks for the information I will look into adding some of those into my negative keywords.

I will look into running the search query reports for our account and see exactly what is going on.

Thanks again for the advice, I already have some ideas for improvement

[smallcompany]

search query reports

Besides that, you should use Google's Keyword Tool to find negatives. Google will show most of popular searches that relate to what you are after.
There are bunch of other searches that this tool does not show, but you'll see them by checking on "See search terms".

If I understand your last statement correctly, the sites trust in google is also related to its trust in adwords, so as a site ages we should see the amount of trust in adwords also increase and hopefully receive a lower minimum bid and see more impressions to our keywords, correct?

I believe so. Sites that have previously been used in AdWords had a chance to go through preliminary clearance.
For example, a site that has been scored with 1/10 has no chance to perform at any level unless it gets manually reviewed (again) and approved.
If the site is new, and an account too (like in your case), you may need some time.

[carelectronics]

Well, I have also met this issue recently. At first the quality scores are all only 3. After 2 days, most of them are 7~10 now.
As our ads are new so the CTR is not the determinant for QS. We just optimized our landing pages, at the same time adjust keywords to the best relevent ad groups to make sure keywords, ads and landing page are quite relevant. you may have a look at these ways to increase quality score. [redflymarketing.com...]