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Seeing patterns with minimum bids!

Do you see them, too?

         

Sujan

4:39 pm on Aug 21, 2005 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Hi everybody,

I recognized some interesting patterns in my accounts. I have an account with several campaigns and adgroups for multiple topics. The CPCs are different too, but even so I see the same minimum bids for all the inactive (hundreds!) keywords:

0,17
0,25
0,34
0,42
0,83
4,14

Do you have the same minimum bids or can recognize a similar pattern in your account?

Jan

Sujan

5:00 pm on Aug 21, 2005 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Oh sorry, forgot to mention that my account is in € (EURO) and all the numbers I mentioned also are, of course.

Jan

patient2all

5:03 pm on Aug 21, 2005 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Sujan,

I guess that's not USD. From me, they want either:

.10
.20
.30
.40
.50
1.00

almost without exception. Words jump in and out of below mininum even when I don't touch them. A couple of thousand resumed on their own which leaves me with about 5,000 out of 45,000 words "Inactive".

There is also a certain simplistic, illogical method by which they chose to inactivate the words that they did.

My sales are unaffected, fortunately.

That's my experience at the moment.

patient2all

Sujan

5:32 pm on Aug 21, 2005 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Thank you patient2all, what I posted is the perfect equal to you numbers in Euro. Now I got it...

Jan

humblebeginnings

5:50 pm on Aug 21, 2005 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



Hi Jan,

I have the exact same pattern as you have!
No matter what I do, all my keywords (most of them worked just fine at 0.05 or 0.10 before the Adwords update) are now 0.17, 0.25, 0,34, 0.42, 0.83 and 4.14. Day after day they have the same price. I can not believe these minimum bids are the result of some smart dynamic bidding algorithm cause in that case:

- prices of keywords should fluctuate instead of being fixed for days;
- there should be a much wider variety of minimum bids;
- and prices of keywords should have some sort of relation to their market value.

For example the keyword "blue widget for sale somewhere in the north of nebraska" has a minimum bid of 4.14 (!) for 3 days in a row now. (Serious! Just try it yourself!)
Yet I don't think anybody would ever bid more than a wooden dime for such nonsense keywords.

inbound

10:30 pm on Aug 21, 2005 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



My tuppence on these.

The irregular amounts are likely to be the result of exchange rates and would round off if in USD.

On the "no-one would ever bid on this phrase" comment, it makes total sense for the bid to be high. The algo looks at a likely CTR and adjusts the CPC to give an indication of what it would take for the (very low) CTR on that phrase x CPC x ad creative quality => decent overall quality score.

An ad with no chance of click through has to have a very high CPC in order to run.

luckychucky

5:58 am on Aug 22, 2005 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



If a keyword is rarely searched-for, that means it has a low number of Impressions. It doesn't follow that it will necessarily have a low CTR (ClickThrough Rate). It might very well be an obscure, rarely searched-for term. It might only get one search every once in a blue moon, but it would still have 100% CTR if that one searcher clicks on the ad the search triggers. And I would venture to assume that a searcher for something obscure (ie: hard to find) is way more motivated to fully explore every single result he gets.

Or maybe you're talking about a keyword search for which the searcher wouldn't be very interested in clicking on the results of his search. (huh?)

Does "Quality" translate as:
"worth Google's time and energy"
rather than:
"relevant to a searcher's query"?...

humblebeginnings

6:15 am on Aug 22, 2005 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



Hi Inbound,

Don't you confuse impressions with CTR?
For "blue widget for sale somewhere north of Nebraska" will have very little impressions, but might have a very high CTR.

Anyways, no matter what keyword I am bidding on, either very popular or completely obscure, Google wants to charge me up to a 100 times more than last week.
I aint gonna pay that. Advertising in local newspapers might be cheaper right now.

Sujan

4:11 pm on Aug 22, 2005 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



The irregular amounts are likely to be the result of exchange rates and would round off if in USD.

Exactly!

0,08 € = 0,10 $
0,17 € = 0,20 $
0,25 € = 0,30 $
0,34 € = 0,40 $
0,42 € = 0,50 $
0,83 € = 1,00 $
4,14 € = 5,00 $

So there are fixed "steps" for the minimum bid - didn't know this before. Thanks!

- Jan