Why is Adwords so Bleeping Expensive???

Hi Jennifer,

Sorry you are having trouble, maybe I can offer suggestions that will help you out.

That was a huge mistake, low competition keywords are often the worst keywords to put into a PPC campaign. There is usually a good reason the competition is low, those keywords are either too ambiguous and/or reflect no commercial intent. Typically, adding those types of keywords will harm your account level Quality Scores and force you to pay higher CPC prices on all your ads.

If you are using a regular AdWords account (not AdWords Express), then you have complete control over your bids. So, you can bid at whatever price you want. Having said that there are many things that will effect the amount you will need to bid to get the amount of traffic you seek.

First and foremost is proper account structure. How you organize your account can make a huge difference in your CPC. If you do not optimize the structure of your account you will have to pay much higher for clicks than your competitors.

Have you checked your Quality Scores? Poor quality scores will force you to pay much higher prices for the exact same keyword ad slot than your competitors. Improper account structure is one of the main causes of poor quality scores among new advertisers.

Here's a video that explains a bit about Quality Score:


New advertisers often combine too many keywords into a single ad group and this will hurt you Quality Scores and force you to pay a much higher CPC for the same keyword. If you make this same account structure error multiple times then you lower your account level QS history which will effect the initial QS for each new subsequent campaign, which makes the initial CPC required for a new campaign much higher at the outset.


Of course account structure is not the only thing that will harm you Quality Scores, but it is the first thing we should check to help you resolve your issue. If your keywords have poor QS then you will need to build a well structured campaign and run it for a short while to get the QS to rise and improve your account level QS history.



This video will give you some specific advice that will help to improve your account level Quality Scores:


Please report back to us the Quality Scores your keywords are receiving so we can diagnose your issue from there.

Hi Jennifer:

I'm with you, every time I set up an Adwords Campaign I would spend days researching keywords, writing great ad copy's, and more than 1, so I could do multi-test for different keywords with different ad copy's.

Now every time the amount of impressions "Google" suggested for the keywords, for the bid amount, would be WAY WRONG, once it was running, and I had several Quality Scores of 8 and 7.

So needless to say I can't afford Google Adwords anymore. I have been using 7search with GREAT results.

I think Google is for the bigger business or at least a business that has MUCH higher profits per sale then I have.

Good Luck

Yes, Google is too expensive...if you don't know what you are doing.

There are a lot of factors (other than their estimate tool) that determine your CPC.

dburk gave a lot of good advice. You have to look at your overall account performance as well as the landing page quality score they are giving you out of 10. You should be at-least a 7/10 if not 8 or 9. If it's 6 or less then you need to test a new landing page and probably your ad copy as well.

You CTR is also really important. Google will reward you for an ad that gets a lot of clicks relative to impressions.

Do you mind sharing what your quality score and CTR are?

The higher those two things are, the less you should have to pay.

I'm getting about .20-.30/click. My quality score for my Ad groups is 7-10/10 and my CTR varies between 9-12%.

You really need a well defined landing page that targets the keywords (don't send someone to the homepage, send them to a specific page on your site) + some killer ad copy that gets a high CTR.

You can still make money with Adwords, just takes a bit more work to set everything up.

And ABT, always be testing

I haven't used Google adwords in over a year or so, but were the suggested bids of $.20-$.3 reflecting the amount you need to bid for the first page of search results? Or was that not indicated?

Perhaps the first page results are $4-$12? Other than that, anything else just sounds like it's beyond astronomical extortion by Google.

Jumping from just $.20-$.30 per click to $4-$12 is ridiculous, regardless of your landing page and ad unless the landing page was totally not relevant to the ad and you used no keywords at all in the title and/or body.

Especially considering that Google uses clicks and impressions in generating your quality score and eventually, your average CPC.

Have you tried to just let the ad run and bid much lower than the suggested $4-$12 to see what happens (like.. $.50)?

Welcome to real world. Now you know why Google is so rich. Because there is high demand.

I strongly suggest you start BING instead, with Google you will blow up your budget in few days.

The truth is their Keyword tool estimation figures are way off reality !

The truth is their QS algoritm works usually against clients, usually calling helpdesk wont help as they have no real clue why your QS dropped suddenly etc etc. Or why you bid 7 dollars if there is just one competitor bididing on the same keyword.

Go with BING if it allows your country.

I always ignore Google's suggested bids, it's never accurate anyway so you are best to ignore it too. But the reason a keyword is expensive is simply due to the competition ... but remember that wherever there is competition in a market, there is also money to be made.

You can try BING which usually has a slightly lower average cost per click due to not enough people bothering with it as it generally has much less traffic than Adwords. But its also a bit less expensive so you can benefit from that extra boost in low-cost traffic.

Nick

Suggested Bids by Google are highly inaccurate. If you are unsure of how to use AdWords or (more importantly) WHEN to use AdWords then you'll always end up crashing and burning.

I can't give accurate advice without knowing what keyword space you are operating in and what business type you are trying to promote. Even then it would take months of testing to find the most profitable use of AdWords.

It is too hard to find cheap clicks on Adwords nowadays.

This is just the backside of the bidding thing

Greetings Jennifer,

I can totally relate. I think it's somewhat deceptive for google to give us the low numbers when setting up a campaign then hit us with outrageous numbers after you click "save". I think some of the warrior suggestions are good, but the real question you posed has to do with google showing totally different price suggestions after saving a campaign. I get it!

The real issue here is not the choice of keywords, but the so called "suggestions" for 1st page bidding that google gives when setting up a campaign. The suggestions are not connected to current bid pricing on the next page. There "suggestions" are not realistic even for low ranking keywords. They give you a $0.30 - $0.50 CPC and then after clicking the Save button - - - POW! They hit you with the real numbers like $1.25 to $4.00 CPC for low ranking, low searched keywords for 1st page exposure. And after all, marketers are not setting up PPC advertising so that they can be discovered on page number 2,075 of the search results.

Not sure of the solution other then working the other engines such as Bing.


Venture Upwards!


John