Google names their price for a keyword, and I haven't got a clue about THE REAL way they do it. I've seen popular keywords that min bid is very low, and I've seen words that NO ONE else is bidding on that gets a lot of clicks that cost $0.50. And Just to confuse things I've seen popular keywords that min bid for high CPC too. I've seen G ask for $5.00 for A CLICK on a particular keyword. It doesn't really make a lot of sense to me. I just emailed G with the question of why I'm paying $0.50 for a word when I'm the only advertizer on the page. I got a response, but it looked like the same song and dance. I saw something about how well the keyword related to my business. HOW can G judge that. I went into detail about what I thought about G's reading ability in another post.
[webmasterworld.com...]
By the way, I stopped bidding on the $0.50 word. Now G's tying to sucker me in by lowering it to $0.40. I think I'll pass.
As for question 3, you might get a few impressions. I've been testing out an image ad, but I can't afford to activate most of the keywords I put into it. There are 2 words that are $0.50 and a couple good ones for $1.00. I activated those, but the rest are going for $5.00. So far I haven't gotten any clicks on the campaign, but I have gotten some impressions. Right now I have 18 impressions for the day, but it won't show which keyword it gave me impressions for. The min bids for the inactive keywords are the same bids I used in the other campaign.
By the way, the third answer about still getting impressions isn't based entirely on my image ad. Google tests the keyword once in a while even if it is bid at below the min.
For me as a first time advertiser (in fact I haven't even activated my account) it seems like a jump in the deep end of the pool to start at 0.35 US (that's a lot for us here in Africa). But maybe that's why there's only one ad showing there - because for such a popular phrase G has loaded the price and nobody can afford to advertise there?
I must say I'm also getting nervous about the posts (including yours) saying that G asks you to up your bid just after you've signed on! How can you budget for a campaign if the costs are not to some degree fixed or predictable?
I'm still deciding if I'll sign up for this.
The reason for not being able to bid low when theres no competition is because the min cpc is now completely UNRELATED to competition, a huge change from the previous sytem. If there were 20 competitors in theory it wouldnt make any difference to the minimum you need to pay to get your ad to show.
The reason your ad may still show even when not "active" is because google need to let your ad run to gauge the performance of any changes you have made (ad copy, url etc). They say you can get a keyword active by EITHER increasing the bid, or increasing the quality, ie ad copy etc. Thats why you will still get some impressions.
I think I've been pretty lucky. Right now I'm still almost at the break even point. I was actually making a small profit earlier today, but now I'm down by about $20. I was pretty damn happy this mourning though.
Right now I've got one ad that gets a lot of impressions from a particular keyword, but as I said earlier I'm not bidding on the most popular words. My word is related, but it also is related to other stuff too. I'm rewriting my ad to try to narrow the focus and let people know exactly what they are getting by clicking on the ad. The ad would have probably worked fine for another keyword, but for this one I have to be very specific as to what I'm paying for them to see.
Once I get this leak fixed I hope to be back into the profits again.
So far the biggest cost of advertising so far has been the ads that I had bid on a keyword that was related, but not closely enough to my product. I'm getting a lot of clicks, but not too many conversions. I've had two keywords that have given me trouble so far. The other one was probably just kids browsing.
By the way, I'm starting to see keywords drop in price a little now. The ones where I'm getting clicks are slowly coming down.
By the way, here's a tip about how to keep an eye on whether G has decided to lower the min bid on a word. Use the traffic estimator. Click on the Edit Keywords button and then click on the Traffic Estimator. It'll tell you your current bid and G's min bid all in a nice table.
I really think that there's still room in this game for more people, but it's not as easy as it once was. I've been lurking around here and posting a bit too. It's probably the best resource I've found to help people succeed in this. I studied for about a month and a half or so before I tried putting up an ad. I have a lot more time than money right now.
Good Luck
Good luck, bru. I'm also lank new but I scheme we'll be shweet.
Rischen
