Increasing bid prices

September 18, 2005

I want to increase my bid prices by 50%. Is it better to build on your existing CTR track record or start fresh with no CTR history in a new campaign.

That’s a great question, and depends on a few factors.

1. How long have you been advertising? If the keywords don’t have much of a history, then just go increase the bids.

2. Are you increasing the prices because of past problems with ‘slow’ or ‘at risk’ keywords and you need a higher position? In that case, I’d make a new campaign.

3. Is your current CTR higher than what you estimate the average CTR is for everyone whos advertising for your exact keywords? If you think your CTR is higher, then increase bid prices and don’t make a new campaign.

4. I’ve done both in the past. In the course of a short time, depending on your ad impressions, just increasing bids, you’ll see the change in position. If your ads get a lot of impressions, in just a few days after the ads are syndicated, you’ll see the changes. If they get few impressions, then it will take longer for your new CTR to level out.

What should happen, is increasing prices will raise your position a little. This will raise CTR over 1000 impressions. As its the past 1000 impressions that matter, you’ll slowly see your CTR climb until it levels out with the new bid prices.

5. I’m sure I’m forgetting something (happens a lot with multitasking), what did I miss?

If you decide to make a new campaign, what you should do is:
1. Make the new campaign with the ads & new bid prices.
2. Wait for the ads to be syndicated with partner sites.
3. Delete the old campaign and every keyword in those campaigns.

Anyone know if this a work around to not type in all the new ads for making a new campaign:

If I edited all my keywords, copied them to a .txt format. Deleted all the keywords. Saved changes, and then went back into edit keywords, pasted them all in, and then saved changes, would the keywords be counted as new if they were in the same adgroup again and thus now having the ‘phantom CTR’ instead of their own CTR history?

With the above workaround, the ads are already syndicated, so even through the adgroup didn’t have any keywords for a short period of time, are they are still considered approved for syndication, and thus I’d only not be shown on AOL for the few minutes I had no KWs in my adgroup?

That seems too easy…I must be missing something there.

Author: vanderbolt