If you’ve been following WMW (see Sudden increase of CPC recently?), the Blogosphere ( see Technorati Search: adwords cpc increase), or even my blog(see Google Adwords Broken or Price Gouging ) you may have seen some some people complaining about increases in min CPC prices for AdWords campaigns. Basic recap of my situation if I bid $5.00 my ads show in the top spot and in some cases even displacing three premium listings, if I bid $4.99 my ads stop showing. If I want to play I have to be willing to play top dollar and be number one, I can’t bid for a lower spot. This happens for brand new advertisements with no history. Because I’m a tinkerer and I like to understand how things work, and because I can be a bit of a nudge and pest I really wanted to figure things out, so I decided to dig a little deeper, and get someone from AdWords to look and I’d also do some recon at Pubcon
Now to provide a little more information if the keyword converts I get a $15 payout so at $5 a click I’m going to need a 33% conversion rate just to break even. While I’m not going to say that’s impossible I will say it ain’t easy, and is pretty difficult. To be successful I really needed to pay a lower CPC for a lower position, I emailed AdWords asking how to reach that goal. After a few emails back and forth here is the response I got:
I’ve reviewed the account in question and specifically the keywords within
theAd Group. The terms in this Ad Group are highly
competitive and will require higher CPCs, particularly when newly created.
I would suggest that you consider expanding the keyword list for this Ad
Group as well as including some additional keyword variations.
Alternatively, you can re-activate the keywords with the higher CPCs. If
these keywords perform well over time, it is likely that their required
CPCs may fall. Below I’ve included some general information regarding
inactive keywords and a link to our Help Center topic regarding optimizing
your keyword list.Our automatic performance monitor evaluates each keyword within your
account when submitted and periodically throughout each day. When a
keyword doesn’t have a high enough Quality Score and maximum
cost-per-click (CPC) to show ads, that keyword may become inactive for
search. If you re-use that inactive keyword, or re-enter it in another
keyword matching format, you may notice that it is inactive for search
again. This is because our system recognizes that this word has not
performed well for you in the past and so is more rigorous in its
evaluation of the word.
Now I wouldn’t say that was especially clear and didn’t really answer my question as to how a I bid a lower price for a lower position. So I decided to try my luck at Pubcon. I went to the Google booth and spoke with one of the reps. Sorry I don’t remember her name but she was helpful and tried to explain things to me, and this is what I got translated into non corporate mumbo jumbo.
- When you start a new ad the average quality score used for all of the current advertisers becomes your quality score. Once your ad is running your quality score gets re-adjusted periodically (I think every few days but not positive on the time frame).
- Once you have a higher quality score your minimum CPC will lower, and allow you to bid into lower positions.
- If you pause or delete campaigns and then try to create another ad with the same keywords your quality score for those keywords will carry over to the new campaign.
So for really competitive keyword phrases you may end up paying more (in some cases a lot more) than you want for a few days in order get a good quality score and be able to lower your bid. While I get what they are trying to accomplish I really think there are quite a few problems with this approach. First off I’ve got to be wiling to overpay and lose a considerable amount of money just to be a player. Secondly using the quality score of other advertisers as my baseline seems a little unfair. Next if I write a bad ad and I want to start from scratch with a new ad using my history for quality score means I’m starting out in the hole. Now if any of Googlers happen across this post and I’ve got something wrong please let me know and I’ll correct it. However if you’ve been negatively affected by this please contact Google AdWords and let them know. Despite the fact that they are a big corporate environment, I actually believe many of them are open to new ideas and responsive to feedback. I spoke with a few people from Google at Pubcon and that they were all pretty interested in hearing what I said as long as I was constructive in the way I said it.
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