The mystery about Low Bidding

You need to find those keywords.

That's the catch.

Low Competition keywords that also converts into leads will solve the puzzle.

Your ad rank is determined by quality and bid. For the same quality, bidding lower by definition lowers your ad's ranking. This could mean you show on page 2 or beyond which could mean that your ads are rarely seen since few people go beyond the first page. Sorts of defeats the purpose of advertising.

You need to know the difference between a bid (also called maximum CPC by some) and what you actually pay, the actual CPC. This is calculated based on your quality and what others are willing to bid. You almost never pay your bid.

More important, you need to understand quality. This is more important than bid because it's a auction and prices are determined by your competitors, a supply and demand situation. If certain number of advertisers are willing to pay (bid) up to $1, and you bid only half that, you are putting yourself at a disadvantage: lower position which results in less clicks since more people click on higher positioned ads. It's more important therefore to improve your quality (higher CTR) than trying to rank based on bid. It's something you can control. You can't control what others are bidding which is determined by the market. With higher quality, you are protecting yourself against others and you are rewarded with lower actual CPC than with a lower quality ad.

CPC is not the most important metric. CPA/ROI is but at the same time you want to maximize profits which will only happen if you get higher CTR, another argument for striving for higher quality and position.

find the best keywords for you

That's wrong thinking, you have to bid high in the beginning in order to achieve a good CTR. Later on, Bing will reward you by giving you high quality score and decreasing your CPCs.

If you keep bidding low, you'll end up having low quality score and you'll never get to pay low per click.

Good luck

Svetlin

Testing is the key.

Usually testing costs money and a long term commitment to a project.

Removing low quality score keywords or improving onsite relevance to the targeted keywords is important particular if there is search traffic for the keyword or more importantly "buyer" search traffic for the keyword.

In many cases you can get good results with lower bids but I would encourage you to test what bids give the best results.

You should try some things like odd number bidding for certain keywords for example. Many people would bid whole number bids so for example $2.00. Test different things like $2.01, $2.02, $2.11, $2.16 etc until you get the right mix of position on the page and CTR to match your expectations.

Test different ad copy...use the experiment functions.

All these things take time but if you have a solid business and are paying attention to other factors once people are on the site then PPC is a great place to get quality traffic.

You can always combine testing short term keyword orientated ads on somewhere like FB and then bring those that are successful into bing or adwords etc.

Sometimes you get lucky but usually testing over a longer period ultimately allows you to refine things so the ROI can be incrementally improved.

thanks everyone for your response.

OK this is where you are going wrong - your ultimate end goal is PROFIT. In order to make a profit (especially a large one), you need a lot of clicks. You can only get clicks if you bid on a large amount of keywords ... and most importantly, you bid high.

Yes, you bid HIGH! You want to aim for ad positions 2-4 and ensure your CTR is at least around 1-2% at campaign level. If you can't keep CTR high, Adwords will penalize you and want you to pay more to keep your ad positions and high click volume. So ensure you get that high CTR by writing good quality ads, add negatives and pause anything that goes below 0.5% CTR.

Spend some money to gather data with CTR being your short-term priority. Get a good number of clicks in from a good number of keywords, see what converts and then optimize for profit by pausing keywords and throttling bids to push them into profitability.

But in order to get there, you need to spend money so expect to break-even in the beginning or make a small loss. Only AFTER you have tested out these keywords can you pause your non-performers and keep your winners in order to make a profit.

Once you have established a solid CTR, you can then also throttle down your bids further on your converting keywords and Adwords should also reward you with some automatically lower bids for your high CTR and Quality Score.

That's how I do it for every new PPC campaign I run nowadays. Hope that helps.

Nick

Does this "low priced " keywords exist anymore at all on adwords?

There is no mystery in low biding. It's such that you are biding low then your competitors then you will be placed higher in the search engine from your competitors.

Your ads will still show up, but not as much as the competitor ads that have a higher bid. Your ads may show up on the second or third page instead of the first mostly.

Check your average placement to see where your ads generally show up. If it is a higher number, then your ads may be lower down the page or on the 2nd or 3rd pages.

Your best bet is to see which keywords are performing the most for you and focus on those until your budget increases.

I'd check the keywords that bring traffic in and add them to the relevant campaign each week to see if they have a lower bid rate, yet still get you results.

Make sure to add negative keywords to your list each week too so that you aren't paying for non-relevant keywords.

Its all down to the research, we do many PPC campaigns for our clients, first part is always keywords research. Get this right you have a fighting chance of good conversions.

if you start off cheapest, you're starting off on the wrong foot. And you are going to have an uphill battle.
they are going to give you their junkiest quality traffic if any at all (do you really want 30,000 clicks from third world countries like nigeria?)


Sure there are *tricks* tro try and make it work.. but it's really not worth it.

I know this goes completely against what alot of self proclaimed gurus on WF tell you when it come to ppc. But there's a reason why they are selling $7 wso's and not making millions.

everyone i know that runs multi-million dollar PPC agencies that control 7 and 8 figure adspend all bid higher. but that's just my 2cents.

big rule: CPC means nothing. EPC means everything! who cares how much you are paying per click.. the only metric you need to focus on is ROI.

i'll spend $2 a click all day every day if my ROI is $5/click

just some food for thought