Have you ever tried to get a set of keywords live on Google AdWords and you continually have to increase the minimum bid just to stay live? I have been going through this lately, and my ads cannot be more phrase matched, targeted or optimized for what I think is a good Quality Score. I have the keyword in the title, description and URL of the ad, as well as optimized landing pages, so why can’t I get them live and keep them live? There are competitors on the same terms, but not more than 7 or so. Even trying to bid on the company name doesn’t come cheaply – it’s up to $1.20, and no one else is bidding on this term.

Is it possible that there are minimum CPC’s for specific categories that are pre-determined to be more than the 5 cent minimum? The company name has a competitive word in it that could possibly trigger its placement in a specific vertical. Google does have the power and data to set market prices, even though this hasn’t been part of the company policy historically (in the spirit of “do no evil”).  But if search revenue growth patterns are starting to slow because the market is becoming mature, it could stand to reason that Google might want to recover revenue growth from increased bid prices.  Not to mention that Google is getting better at countering click fraud, and so in theory advertisers are receiving cleaner traffic than they were a year ago. If there is no more minimum bid price, but a price set by Google, determined by fraud clean-up by vertical and overall search volume demand, is this fairer than free market prices?

Deborah Kilpatrick
President, dSideMarketing.com

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 25th, 2007 at 11:49 am by Alexandre Brabant and is filed under General, PPC Management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.