Affiliate Marketing Forum

JWood · Joined: 15 Jan 2007 Posts: 1

Can someone explain to me how google minimum bids work?

I am a bit confused. This last week I published my first few ads for google adwords. My ads, depending on keywords, were from positions 2-7. As I started to get clicks, my minimum bids from google starting increasing.

On one of my campaigns,I started with a low bid of $0.10 for a certain keyword. About 6 hours later, my keyword became inactive, and googles minimum bid went to $0.15. I moved the minimum bid to $0.15 and went active again. About 3-6 hours later, google changed the minimum bid to $0.30. Again, I changed my bid, and went active again. On and on this went, until the minimum bid was $1.00 for this keyword. At this point, as a new advertiser, I could no longer afford the budget that is necessary to get the conversion ratio to make money.

1. Can anyone explain to me how the google minimum bid system works?

2.Does anyone know of a way that I can have reasonable low minimum bids, and not have google increase my minimum bids?

Thanks for any help you can provide.

Jay Stockwell · Joined: 10 Oct 2003 Posts: 2

Hi JWood,

The way that Google works is a little mysterious at times isn't it! Smile

There are really two factors at work here. The quality score, and the minimum bid factor. Both are inter-related.

What appears to be happening is that they have analyzed your ads quality and set it at a certain level. They have guessed at how relevant it is and let you enter at the 10 cent mark.

However as time has gone on, your ads are being shown, but not getting enough clicks. Consequently they review those keywords that they thought might have not been totally relevant for your landing page and have increased the minimum bids.

You will find that this actually will work both ways so that you could adjust ads that perform really well down below 10 cents if you wanted.

Here's some info from Google here:

https://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=49174

Here's a rough strategy that I have successfully used.

1) Have lots of laser focused ad groups that have highly targeted keywords focused on highly targeted landing pages.

2) Write 4 of the best possible ads you can. Perhaps using dynamic keyword insertion. Keep deleting the worst performing ads and replacing with them with new ones that are refined to try and

3) Start with all your keywords at twice the price you want to pay for them for the first few hundred impressions. Once they have established a good CTR you can start reducing the price back down again.

4) Remove all poorly performing keywords from the ad groups.

I hope that helps. If you want more tips, I've written a free 12 part course entitled "Double your PPC profits while halving your costs."

You can grab it over at Pay Per Click Search Engines Dot Com.

Cheers,

Jay.

r8doman · Joined: 24 Jan 2007 Posts: 22 Location: Hometown USA

Good advice.

You can also use the keyword tool on Google (not great...but it works).

Take your best performing keyword, put it in the keyword tool...then select "Cost and Ad Position Estimates" from the drop down menu. Set the amount you're willing to bid at 2 dollars and the tool will show you all the relevant keywords and their prices as well as positions. Scroll down the list to find the relevant keywords and price you want to use and add them to your campaign.

Also, sidebar tip...work the highest cost keywords into your ad text and title if you can.

I've found there's life on page 3 or 4 too. You don't have to be on page 1. That's a mistake I'm only recently realizing and it's led me to the highest commission check yet. Some Google searchers are beginning to get a bit skeptical about the first page of results for their search. I do. I always assume the first result in a Google search is part of Murphy's Law "the most obvious answer isn't necessarily the right one" kind of thing.
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