Adwords PPC Sticker Shock

November 29th, 2007 · No Comments

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.

It seems the Quality Score is really just Google’s way of telling you that you’re allowed to spend money on Adwords.

“Oh, you actually wanted traffic with that?”

OK, I realize it’s a competitive niche, so I started nudging my maximum bid prices up for my “money” keywords.

I currently have my bid prices up to .40 and my ads are only at the bottom of page 2 of the search results. Based on my conversion rate and payout from last year, I will lose money at these bid prices. Oh, and just in case you’re saying to yourself, but if your CTR is high enough, then Google will lower your minimum bid price.

Yeah, dream on.

Seems that only happens to other people. I’ve really yet to experience that for competitive keywords.

So, in effect, I’ve been virtually “Google Slapped” with keywords with “Great” Quality Scores. Might as well demote them all to “Poor” and raise their minimum bids to $5.00 - $10.00.

I’m now coming to the conclusion that I have no programs that I can profitably advertise on the Adwords Search Network. The only options left to me for promoting them is to either get organic traffic (oh, the work!) or drill deep down into the Adwords Content Network for cheap untargeted traffic.

Oh yeah, in case you’re thinking to yourself, “why don’t you just try MS AdCenter or Yahoo! Search Marking?

Well, you know how it is.