Throwing the towel in with Adwords

September 24, 2005

Hi Folks,

Before august 18 I thought I should invest in Adwords in order to sell products online. But since the august 18 update, all I did is trying to get rid of these $ 0.50 to $ 5.00 keywords.

I know some of you have keywords running on $ 0.03 and $ 0.02, but it appears this is mainly the case with established accounts. I am new to Adwords and I don’t have CTR history. Thus, for every new campaign I start, Google charges me ridiculously high minimum bids. I honestly have no idea how to deal with this.
Unless I am really not smart enough to handle Adwords, many newcomers will face the same problem; these ridiculous minimum bids.

The point is, I want to be in the advertising business, don’t wanne spend all day trying to solve mysterious algo’s.

And I honestly don’t understand why Google thinks that making their costumers decoding mysterious algo’s all day will help them.

So at the end of august I decided to give Yahoo a chance. It has its flaws too, but it works.
At least you can have campaigns running for $ 0.10 per click.

I must say I have a lot of respect for AWA, for explaining to us the recent changes in the Adwords system. However…
AWA has repeatedly implied that some of the changes in Adwords have been made cause of people in this forum have asked for it. Thus making us a bit responsible for these changes.

I would like to state that nobody in this forum ever asked for minimum bids of $ 5.00!

Instead, I would like to do the opposite;
AWA, please ask Google to lower the minimum bid for every keyword to a decent level of $0.05 - $ 0.10.

Every week I am spending more money on advertising, but right now it all goes to Yahoo. I guess I am not the only one…

* If bid amounts are up as a whole - I can assure you the difference isn’t finding its way into publisher accounts either.

Somebody is getting fat.

* Zactly! Haven’t had many $ 5.00 clicks on the Adsense side lately!
* Humble. Did you already throw away your account?

Could be a good account for experimentation. Maybe collect all the very best suggestions from WW, start small (1 or 2 copies in a group) with a select few keywords. Bid low and see what happens. Hard to know why your min’s are at 5 bucks though. I deleted some of mine when they got that insane. But it did suggest to me that I might be doing something terribly wrong. Don’t know what it was though. Could have been dealing with G in the first place

-Dr.X

* No X, my account is still in operation.
Just paaused about all the campaigns.
Perhaps your idea can help me.
Since I consider my account almost useless, I might do some experiments that one wouldn’t do with an extremely profitable account…

* If bid amounts are up as a whole - I can assure you the difference isn’t finding its way into publisher accounts either.
Somebody is getting fat.

No guesses who they are!

Why not look into advertising directly with publishers? By cutting out the middle man you will spend less money.

Matt

Perhaps a call to all the wisest of the wise (hint,I’m not one of them:) for some ideas.

If I can help in any way what so ever, say so. It can only serve to educate me too. Do you have any ideas?

-Dr.X

* humblebeginnings,

I guess my situation was very similar to yours. I entered the Adwords game 1 week before the Quality Score nonsense came into effect. In this first week I had my first campaign which had a poor CTR (below 0.5% threshold), was suspended by G and deleted by me afterwards. I stepped into QS era with short and lousy account history and any keyword I tried had min CPC of $1.00 to $5.00. Today I’m in much better shape. I haven’t overcome this problem completely yet, but I do have keywords running at $0.03 to $0.05 CPC. I am not sure that what worked for me will work for you, but you can give it a try.

I picked up a keyword with relatively “low” outrageous CTR of near $1.00 and put a $0.10 bid on it. Nothing happened for a couple of days. After several days I started to get impressions on the keyword in spite of the fact that the min CPC had not changed and the keyword remained “inactive”. Apparently, G still runs keywords in a trial mode even if you don’t meet min CPC criteria. This time my CTR was pretty good ~2-3%. In the next few days I saw the required min CPC falling and the keyword becoming active. Today the keyword has min CPC of $0.03.

This week I also had exactly the opposite experience. Min CPC has soared and keyword has gone inactive as a result of poor CTR. As I see it, the Quality Score is bull#$%t, it is still CTR*CPC that is important.

Unfortunately, low CPCs do not guarantee profit Damned conversion rates … I am still learning how to do it with Adwords and affiliate marketing.