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If a bidder below you lowers their bid or just drops out, you may find that your bid is too high. Go in and correct it. It may be 1 cent or 5 cents - it all adds up.
Remember that you need not bid or the CORE KW if the bids are out of line with your profit margins. Secondary KWs make good bidding opportunities.
For may other KW, the top bids went overboard an it's simply not worth anymore. As many predicted on this board, Auto Bid & Match Driver raised the bar and eliminated many niche search terms for Overture's benefit.
Our opinion of Overture is now so negative that we decided not to use Auto Bid to raise the cost of the bids of our competition because we do not want to play Overture's game and raise their profits.
Surprisingly many competitors saw this because Overture reveals your bids to them and cost started to go down for many KW. Competing bidders, unite! BTW is it illegal to contact your competition and negotiate a cease fire?
It also pushed us to finally try Google's Adwords and the results are great with many cheap terms if you use wisely [exact match] and -KW (negative keywords) which is not available in Overture. Besides, we are happy to support the best SE on the web. We moved 30% of our budget to Google so far.
Glad that AdWords is working well for you. Any features you'd want us to add?
Prevent "carpet bidders" from clogging the spots for more refined/niche search terms. Like the search term "jewelry canada" or "engagement rings canada".... it's very expensive because everyone is bidding on "jewelry" or "engagement rings" ...and the results don't serve users well when there could be better ads written for canadians, and it is too expensive for such a niche term in my opinion.
Thanks :)
I got an e-mail (about 10 days after setting the ads up and getting good stats) to say they were disapproved because of my gramma (good thing there's nothing wrong with my speeling). So I had to change a bunch of ads and now have twice as many ads greyed out (and I know you can hide them, but I'd rather not have changed them to start with).
Don't get me wrong, I am all in favour of consistent editorial process, but this prescriptive stuff is a bit rich. Take face in the fact that Google, Overture and Espotting are all in the same boat "we're going to do X.... because it's good for you" but that doesn't make it any better.
Overture have their Match Driver where they know that people typing in X are actually looking for Y.
Espotting have the requirment to have the keyword in the title regardless of whether you want it or not.
The bottom line is that we need to get the income that the PPC's provide, so will jump through the hoops. I wish someone would write some common sense editorial rules and look at the context of the ads rather than enforcing it like Robocop.
There are still today thousands of ads that breach all of the editorial standards being shown on a daily basis..... do you guys have double editorial standards or just a backlog of ads to get round to?
Having said all of the above, I still use them system because we get good ROI and our customers love us as a result.
We love our AdWords program. Great results at the right price.
We do have one problem. Our location has a Spanish name which both English and Spanish users search for. Under the Spanish term which gets 500 - 600 searches a day we pay on average 5˘ per click (incl. the US). Under the English term which only gets a few hundred searches a day (and for which we had a CTR of 3%) the minimum bid to cover the USA is 43˘. After struggling with the high costs for a month we finally had to reduce our maximum bid and eliminate the US which we really don't want to do. All the rest of the world seems to come in at under 10˘. This just doesn't make sense.
Somewhere on one of the threads it mentioned that the banner program runs out on Oct. 1. Does this mean that the bid will return to a more reasonable level?
Hope to hear a positive comment on this.
FYI
One example of the traps of Auto Bid:
- competitor #1 bids $.040
- you Auto Bid $.39 to "make him pay" and because #3 is at $.10, your cost is at $.11
Then a few minutes later: #1 or #3 bid $.38 so there you go, you are now paying $.39. Who is smiling? (tip: it starts with an "O")
That's my point: simply bid $.11 to be #2, don't play Overture's profit game unless it's necessary to do so temporarily to make a point with your competitors.
In the real life example above when we made that $.11 bid, #1 lowered to $.11 to be #2 so we lowered to $.09 to be #3. Results? All 3 are in the top spots with mucho menos dinero for Overture. On this search term, we have a CTR of 40 to 50% because of good and targeted ad copy, even if we are #3. Who cares about being numero uno?
GoogleGuy: "Any features you'd want us to add?" Ya, 1 free click for every 100 we pay to thank us for being such nice customers.
Seriously, would be nice to be able to see the reports by country.
One comment GoogleGuy: use less smilys in your postings (I think your average is 2.3 per post :). Don't worry we are already convinced that you are lovable!
My worry is what'll happen if in future, OV decides to make auto bid a default feature instead of the optional which I am sure they'll do few months later.
IMHO maybe someone who can work out a good strategy for lowering the bids rather than raising them can come out a winner in the end.
FYI
Sorry to ask a silly question, but what is FYI?
Well, along with this silly question, one more, what is RSVP?
This is a problem with Adwords for sure. I have a number of markets I would like to use Adwords for, but they are niche... the main term for the genre of which is very expensive... but the niche term which includes it should not be.
The result is that I don't bother for these markets. It's simply not cost effective.
The other point born2drv makes is equally valid: the net result of this is that it lowers the relevency of the Adwords for searchers in these niche markets. They are not seeing focused ads because the advertisers are being forced out of the market by the generic terms.
Unless the strategy is just to wait for Overture to bury itself (which it is obviously trying to do on the evidence of recent changes), Google has some work to do in this area.
RSVP = Respondez si'l vous plait = Please reply, in French
So, I don't think your system is perfect, but it is better than any of the others.
Possible improvements:
1. Reducing the minimum bid requirements ... some terms have a minimum bid of 50 cents and no advertisers, or maybe one advertiser(because none of them can afford to bid 50 cents)
2. Better search term suggestion tool - overture's tool is much better than google's
Go google!
YA
It shouldn't take a PhD to figure that out ;)
[paraphrase]Minimum cost-per-click rates have been set for AdWords Select keywords. Minimum CPCs are based on demand, performance, and market value of the keywords in the original AdWords program. Therefore, different keywords may have different minimum CPCs, starting at $0.05.
We at Google understand that the demand and value for certain words may change over time, and we will be reevaluating these values in the future.[/paraphrase]
GoogleGuy, since you asked, I would request that this practice be done away with. Adwords is great but, let fair market value dictate what we pay, not what you think we would be willing to pay.
Nice post hannamyluv]
We do not use direct quotes from private Email here at WebmasterWorld - fyi
[edited by: Mike_Mackin at 1:37 pm (utc) on Sep. 23, 2002]
(Advertiser's Max Bid: $2.89)
(Advertiser's Max Bid: $2.88)
(Advertiser's Max Bid: $0.19)
yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
Or #1 could do the same and bid .20. The stupidity is making Overture rich.
Still no response. I have alot of business to give Google. They just need to drop those 50 cent minimuns, where there are no advertisers.
I got plenty of words I will spend 15 cents or 20 cents max. I get negative ROI over 25 cents and we buy our product directly from the manufactuer in volume and sell directly to retail. So if i can't make a buck at 50 cents a pop, nobody can.
If you are listening GoogleGuy, give your marketing people a whack in the head, cause they are out of touch with reality.
”RSVP = Respondez si'l vous plait = Please reply, in French” - Napoleon
Thanks Napoleon, I always thought it meant respond very promptly:)
You need:
Bulk upload,
Bulk download
Bulk method to change bids.
Changing or reactivating capaigns with you is nearly impossible.
yup. but would you complain if such stupidity were to make you rich?! :)
at least overture gives us the option of paying stupidly high rates or fairly sensible rates. for me, google adwords CPC is (on average) 10 times that of overture, even though there are no other bids for many terms in google.
I would really wish Googleguy to give his comments on mimimun keyword prices, and why by keeping them, they wish to play second fiddle to Overture.
It is my understanding that this MAY NOT be true in Europe. Can anyone confirm this?
We run Adwords campaigns on behalf of clients and it's time consuming to write our reports to them. I guess all the data is in there, but sometimes a great big Excel spreadsheet is the best starting point when you're writing a custom report, which you then pare down to the bits you're interested in.
Just one example: how about a day-by-day report, that shows how much each day cost in a particular month, plus impressions, ctr, and maybe even a summary of the successful phrases you targeted.
After all if Google did do this we would all be advertising at Adwords all the time and we will all be jumping up and down worrying we have all our eggs in one basket :)
