I guess that isn't good enough for Google because they now want me to "increase quality" or bid higher. This seems strange considering that there is no one else bidding on the term.
Is it possible that Google is reacting to the entire ad group?
Google used to give your keyword and ad a chance to prove its relevancy (judged by user clicks). It seems that's not the case any more.
I can understand their logic for highly competitive keywords, but why not give ads a chance to fail for less competitive keywords?
Google needs to move to a two-tiered system for keywords or they will continue to have problems fully utilizing their inventory.
I have a keyword that got 1 click on 3 impressions.
JBrown, three impressions is not really enough to consider the 33% CTR as being statistically valid. It'd be much better to look at it when it when impressions are in the hundreds - if not in the thousands.
If you find that the AdWords system is suggesting an increased minimum bid, I'd suggest making sure that the keyword brings up an ad that is extremely well targeted to that keyword. In the long run, this will help you to run with a lower minimum bid.
Google needs to move to a two-tiered system for keywords or they will continue to have problems fully utilizing their inventory.
This is an interesting point. However, I'd say that Google is actually less concerned with utilizing inventory than with showing highly relevant ads to our users. Put another way, we'd rather show no ads than to show ads that are not likely to be highly relevant to the searcher. It's a matter of sacrificing short term gain, in order to create long term benefit.
IMO, it is very much to everyone's long-term benefit to have an AdWords program that is trusted (and therefore used) by those millions who search on Google. In this context, increasing quality hopefully makes a lot of sense.
AWA
Well, it won't get there if the minimum bid is too high :)
"...showing highly relevant ads to our users..."
I agree, but I think the best way to measure relevance is user behavior. If users aren't clicking on the ad, then it's likely not relevant.
I understand doing some filtering upfront for highly competitive keywords, but I don't think that makes sense where there is less competition. It's likely better for users, advertisers, and Google to let ads succeed or fail on their own merit (at least until they reach a certain threshold - 1,000 impressions for example). Using technology to pre-screen relevance works in some cases, but not in all.
Thanks for your feedback, AWA!
No wonder Google thinks keywords are badly performing if people are having to pay £5 a click - no one will ever make that pay.
Also, I for one do not understand how the "quality score" works. How exactly can Google judge whether or not an advert is relevant before it's even had chance to run?
Create a new ad group with the same keywords and ad text and then put in a new landing page or your old landing page if you made changes to that. It doesn't seem to work if you've already created an ad with keywords and just change the landing page in that particular ad, it seems you have to create a new ad group to trigger another scan of the landing page.
Just because you see no other ads, you shouldn't assume thier are no other bids, or haven't been other bids. I think it more likely means, that like you, other people have not been able to come up with an ad/landing page/ctr history combination that Google finds relevent for that particular word. This often seems to be the case for a number of very very high volume keywords.
He may well have had a good combination, but he will never know as Google now wants to raise his minimum bid to keep going.
