So, I’ve got a few campaigns currently running on Adwords for merchants that I had some success with this same time last year. These are campaigns in relatively competitive consumer product niches. Not hyper-competitive like the financial niches, but last year I could get on the first page of Google results for a bid price of between .15 to .20.
This time around I was disappointed to find that I was getting virtually no impressions several hours after putting up my Adwords campaigns for these products. Google’s diagnostics were telling me that my ad was not being shown on the first page of results for all of my keywords even though most of them had a “Great” quality score with a minimum bid price of .04.