Summer Ad Group is now completely .2 or .3 min bid. It's obvious that Google is setting min bids to generate a certain price point for the most "popular" or highest volume searches. My page that used to have mostly 'Great' rankings with .5 min bids is now totally inactive.

more of the same

Traffic is minimal these days. Adwords still wanting .15/.2/.3 min bids on the most popular keywords. Getting high single and double digit CTRs on less popular keywords, but a meager 9000 impressions a day. Some of the less popular keywords have adjusted to great and down to .5 but not many.

A new Ad Group - no change

Creating a new adgroup didn't seem to help. Keywords that had a Min Bid of .15 yesterday, and a good CTR for the day, are today Min Bid .20.

For example.. these 2 keywords were .15 Min Bid yesterday.
Yesterday's stats are:
One kw had 71 clicks of 1326 impressions.
CTR = 5.35% Ave CPC= .15 Current Bid was .16 QS was and still is "OK"

Another kw had 3 clicks of 41 impressions.
CTR = 7.31% Ave CPC = .15 Current Bid was .16 QS was and still is "OK"



Now how do keywords that performed so well (assuming 5+ % CTR is good) get bumped to a Min Bid of .20 for today. Again, neigher the Ad text nor the website changed last night. A kw that had CTR of 6.45% is still ranked as Great w/ Min Bid .05. Hopefully that will last at least a few days.

The ludicrousy continues

As you'll see below (April results), several keywords that have successfully been pulling in results at an Ave. CPC of .15 now have a Min Bid of .20. These keywords all have a decent CTR and in case you're not familiar with how Adwords works, wouldn't have been getting impressions if I weren't bidding over the Min Bid. In other words, some time during the last 3 days, the Min Bid was .15. There are many more examples of this in this Adwords group and others.

Now, neither the ad text nor my landing page has changed in the past few days, so I can't attribute this raise in Min Bid to my doing anything that would violate any of the Adwords guidelines for landing pages. Hmmm, seems like Google just decided to raise the price for no reason, even when the keywords were bringing in results with a decent CTR. Unfortunately, that is becoming oh so familiar of an occurrence.



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