Results for 5 cents

very cheap

[jacobwissler]

I do not have much experience with PPC and do not promote it, but I do spend $100 per month on AdWords to see what I can do.

I was totally shocked that with a click through rate of 1.4, I get almost as many clicks at 5 cents as I got at 80 cents. Drop your bid to 5 cents and see what it does to your results. If your click through rate is over 1.0, there may be no reason to pay big bucks.

The only advantage to paying more money is that the top spot, the blue bar at the top of the page, has a minimum price, and you will never get that position at 5 cents.

In the name of full disclosure, I must state that I only tried this with one ad, but it has been working for a month - at 5 cents per click.

[Syzygy]

Good luck to you.

I pay min cpc across 95 per cent of the keywords in my campaigns and can have click through rates ranging from just under 1 per cent to +20 per cent (and occasionally +30 per cent has been known). This has been the case for nearly two years now.

Yes, you certainly can get great results at the minimum rate - but it doesn't work for everyone - luckily I'm working in specialist markets so the competition isn't as fierce as it is in other, more commercial and thus saturated segments - and beyond that there are many factors involved in achieving success.

As for the top slot - the blue bar - well, I've got several ads there currently - all at min cpc. I'm sure others here have likewise.

All that matters is that you find out your own methodology for success. If something works uniquely for you then that's fantastic - stick with it. I wish you every success.

Syzygy

[justshelley]

I have one account with $100 monthly budget and several thousand terms at minimum (5 cent) bids. His account is very successful BUT he's an exception to the rule.

I do have several other accounts at 6 to 11 cents though that are doing quite well in highly competitive industries and markets. No, it is not always necessary to have large budgets to be successful in Google if you do a good job setting up your search terms, negative terms, categories and ad text from the beginning.

[dave741]

... the blue bar at the top of the page, has a minimum price, and you will never get that position at 5 cents.

This is not true. I have there several phrases with bid price 0.05

[poster_boy]

Each fractional increase in average position affects the amount of traffic you'll receive... so, there absolutely is a benefit to paying more than the minimum CPC - if you can continue to earn a meaningful profit on each click.

Now, if there's little competition... well, that's nice. But in most verticals, you're doing yourself a disservice lingering at the bottom if you can afford to be floating near the top.

[justshelley]

Not ALWAYS best to pay more or rank higher. One of my largest clients paid $27K in April for 20,000 clicks but we dropped bids dramatically for May and paid $3,900 for 9,000 clicks AND made a profit for the first month since the new product launch.

We took the list of terms/categories that converted and discovered that product/company names converted better than any of our terms. We kept those terms in high positions (1/2).

We took high conversion terms/categories (only a couple hundred terms total) and dropped bids dramatically with top bids from 15 cents to $1.15.

EVERYTHING else in the campaign got dropped to 6 cents (on penny over minimum bid).