Insane. Is it possible that someone could have bid a really high ammount when the min bid was like $.01, but because of their quality, they keep paying $.01 and force new advertisers to pay unrealistic amounts?
I've tried putting this keyword in all my adgroups and campaigns and can't get below $5 CPC. I have never even used the keyword before :/
Do other bidders influence your min bids?
In a word, no. Your minimum bid is not influenced by the number of competitors you have for a keyword (whether it is zero or many), nor by what your competitors are bidding.
Rather your minimum bid for a keyword is a reflection of the Quality Score for that keyword as it is used in your account. So, ideally, the keyword would be carefully chosen, not too general, and highly targeted to the ad that it brings up.
Here's some more info on the subject of Minimum Bid from the AdWords Help Center:
What's the lowest amount I can pay per click?This depends on your keyword's Quality Score, which is determined by your keyword's clickthrough rate (CTR), relevance of ad text, historical keyword performance, and other relevancy factors. The higher the Quality Score, the lower the minimum bid and price you'll pay when someone clicks on your ad. In some cases, you can even pay as little as your currency's smallest denomination (for example, 1 cent in USD) if you have a very high Quality Score. So you should aim for the highest quality keywords, ads, and campaigns possible to drive down your advertising costs.
(Quoted from this page: [adwords.google.com...]
Hope that helps. ;)
AWA
PS - By the way, I should mention to the Forum at large that I'll be out of the office on Monday, and not able to read/post. Yep, I'll once again be in the Land of No Computers...
I should mention that this subject has been discussed in many previous threads. The trouble always was and is that nobody really knows what the "other relevancy factors" are. And they have proven to be rather important because one could write an ad that is perfectly matched with keyword and landingpage, and still pay 5 bucks per click in a new adgroup with no CTR history. But totally unrelated or meaningless keywords (let's say "flibbedeeflutteradoo") put in the same adgroup, connected with the exact same ad-copy and landingpage, can be much cheaper.
The way Google determines the price of keywords still is a mystery. There is only one thing we know for sure; keywords in general are way to expensive. That's why many advertisers bring their money to Yahoo and other competitors.
By the way, sorry for being grumpy, but I still don't understand why Google doesn't adress this. It hurts that Google doesn't want to have my money...
