The more general term (widgets) has a high cpc, and I can understand that competition is high, and so thus the price, but for the more obscure term, the price is also high (over .25 per click). The high price might work for some businesses, but not for what I'm trying to sell (margins and conversion are too low).
Has anyone found a way around the minimum CPC for obscure terms. I tried changing the term to "exact" (by using brackets instead of quotes in the keyword list for the add) but to no avail.
Just feels wrong to have to pay more for a phrase that nobody else is bothering to compete for.
The min price generally gets more expensive the more terms you add, completely different from overture. This also unfortunately discourages niche advertisers, and I note the Adwords seem very very general and sometimes even irrelevant on many SERP pages.
Ive found no way around it. I guess it is just the nature of the way Adwords works, and it doesn't work for us, so we have to keep on sending our money over to overture!
Another thing that's not too cool, for several of the terms in my advertising list, I'm "forced" into the top posistion. I don't have a choice in what to pay, but have to pay the minimum, even if they min they list puts me at the top though being top is not so important to me. Especially if all the ads are irrelevant, then wouldn't hurt much to be listed last, since most of the first ads will be ignored if not relevant ;-)
I would hope to get more return from the more targeted phrases. From the return on investment point of view it seems to make sense to charge more per click.
A mixture of Overture and AdWords makes sense to me, with the spend concentrated on the best predicted return on investment. Most of the sites I'm involved in concentrate on free listings, with paid clicks as an occasional supplement.
We have seen many advertisers begin their campaign, let it ride for 6 to 8 weeks, and then give up on it. That's too bad, cause they drive up the price, thinking they're return will be such and such, then make the terms unnafordable for all until they come back to earth and realize conversions are difficult to achieve. A steady stream of newb advertisers keeps the prices inflated. I don't know what formula google uses to calculate their cpc, but it's too much.
Google can argue that charging what the market will bear is fair business, and it is, but the program will not be used by solid operations, with the experience to know what is worth being involved in and what is not. Whether this hurts google (and goverture) or not, who can say.
If people are happy to spend a lot on paid advertising then it helps to keep Google as a very large, frequently updated and highly relevant free service (compared with most other engines). It also helps to make SEO look cost effective;).
As for whether it's worth it, that comes down to conversion ratio and profit per sale. For some sites, $10 per visitor is great value, for others $0.10 per visitor is far too expensive.
