If there are no price suggestions on Adwords, what should I do for keyword bids?

Just bid whatever you are willing to pay and see where it lands you. After that, you can then adjust your bid up or down. Of course, if there are little to no searches for your keyword, it may not matter much. But if there are searches and just not a lot of competition, bid whatever you like and take it from there after you get the data you need.

Ok thank you.

I got one more question, could it be interesting to use the automated bidding? Then I guess I will watch what keywords are performing well and I can manually set up a price for them.

That will be our first AdWords PPC campaign so that will be our first experience with google adwords.

Thank you again guys.

I've only ever used manual bidding because I like to have control over how my budget is spent and I set different bids for both individual keywords and match types. But if you want to start out with automatic bidding, then make sure your daily budget is something you're comfortable with losing while you gain data. And if you choose an automatic bid type that has an optional max CPC that you can set, be sure to set that so that your whole budget isn't used up in one click. Then when you have enough data to start determining your best keywords and bids, change to manual bidding.

If the max cpc you can pay is very low like that, I would just start out with that as a maximum bid to get your ad shown and as highly ranked as possible with your budget. Then you can see if that is even enough to get your ad shown at all, and if it is, where it is ranked.

What you want to do is get your quality score as high as possible. So, you need to keep everything as tightly related as possible. Your keywords need to match your ads. Your ads need to match your landing page. Your landing page needs to match your offer.

You want clicks on your ads to be people who are very interested in what you have to offer, so nothing vague and no blind copy just to get people to click. You want only potential buyers who know what to expect on the other side of that ad.

I'm not going to tell you what to set for a budget. If you aren't in a hurry to gather data and want to learn how things work, you can start as low as $5 a day. The lower your budget, the longer it takes to gather data and then to optimize. The quicker you want to find out what works and what isn't working, the more money you will have to spend.

So there is a trade off and you will have to determine what is right for you. With your very first campaign, I'd rather you not be in a rush and learn what you are doing. However, I know nothing about your business or your situation and so will not tell you what you should do. I never start out that low because of how long it takes to gather data and optimize, but you and I are in very different circumstances. Do what you are comfortable with and learn in the process.

Well, the end result you want is to make money. I'm assuming that here since you didn't say - there are other reasons to advertise but I'm going to assume that is your goal since you didn't say otherwise. So are those keywords making you money? Are they getting you sales? Are they getting you subscribers? Are they doing whatever it is you want them to do when they get to your page? That is how you determine what the winning keywords are.

Clicks without conversions only cost you money instead of making it. Clicks aren't what you want. Conversions - however you define that for your purposes - is what you want. And profitable conversions are what you want. That can be long-term profit, however, not just immediate. You need to know the lifetime value of your customers. You need to know if your conversions cost you more than what they make you.

Keywords that don't perform well should be removed. Keywords that do perform well should be optimized. That can mean many things depending on the circumstances. It could mean raising bids to get more exposure, but not necessarily. You may find that raising bids lowers your return on investment. You have to test it out.

You should definitely take any winning keywords and specialize your advertising for them. Make your ads very specific for those keywords, make separate landing pages for those keywords. Depending what your products are, you may want to specialize your products to have versions that cater to your best keywords (that may or may not apply to what you are selling).

Before deciding keywords are not performing well though and removing them, you need to make sure you are testing properly. Make sure you have a high quality score for those keywords or do what it takes to get a high score. Test various ad copies and landing pages for those keywords. Make sure your product itself is high quality and something you know people would want to buy if you get targeted traffic to it. Make sure your website loads quickly, all the links work, use good grammar and spelling (except in rare instances where that's not what is expected), and make sure nothing about your site, your funnel, the buying process would give the visitor a reason to second guess a purchase.

So, don't cut keywords too quickly without testing and enough data. But then when it is clear the keywords aren't leading to conversions or the conversions are too expensive and you can't get it down anymore, then get rid of them and focus on your best keywords and try to make them even more profitable.

Ok, I have to get back to work and then go to bed, so that should be enough for you to get started in the right direction. Good luck to you.

I assume by long-tail that you likely mean something like “10 pack green round metal widget”. In the vast majority of cases, using such a keyword is pointless. Unless that's how people search for that type of product. Obviously, nobody does since Google doesn't have data on it.


In the example above, the main keyword would be “metal widget”, “round metal widget” at the most if the shape of it would matter. So check what the suggested bid is for that keyword. You will be competing against those anyway.


Note too that it's a suggested bid to get at or near the first position (which you say is what you want). You may pay less if your quality is higher than average because the suggestion is based on average Quality Score. It doesn't know what your QS will be yet.


Now your problem is that you don't even know how much you are willing to bid, much less pay. This is not good. This means that you don't know your numbers. You don't know the conversion rate of your page and that is primary to figure out how much you can afford to pay and still make the profit you'd like. In short like JC said, there's nothing we can suggest in that case. You're the one who has to know his numbers.


Don't run anything on automatic, ever. Especially if you don't know your numbers. You want as much control as possible. This also helps when making decisions. You can't make good decisions if some software made decisions which may be all over the map. It could have bid $0.05 in one auction and $0.50 in another. This can wildly skew the numbers you see. But less so if you set your bid at $0.40


Budget is the same thing. In fact, it's the most irritating question to me. My standard answer is, figure out the numbers and set a budget that will cover 100% of the searches made on your keywords. If that's too high for you, then set it to what you are comfortable with but keeping in mind that with less traffic comes less sales.

Your budget will be spent as people search and click on your ads. So if keyword A gets 100 searches and your CPC is $0.20 and your CTR is 10%, that's 10 clicks costing $2. Meanwhile, keyword B may be searched 30 times but your CTR is 20% and each click costs $0.50 resulting in 6 clicks at total cost of $3. The total spend for the two keywords would therefore be $5.

Your budget is simply the maximum amount you want to spend for all your keywords. The bid is the maximum you want to spend for that keyword. There is no relation.

Once your budget is used up, that's it until the next day. You can set a budget and never reach it. If in my simple example above that's the only two keywords you have, you can set your budget to $50 but you'd spend $5 simply because of the math: there's only so much search volume for them, your CTR is only so much and each click costing so much. Doesn't mean because you set a certain budget that Adwords will - or can - spend it. You are just telling it not to spend more if the numbers would make it possible.

The basic ranking formula is your bid times your QS. You have to assume that competitors cover the whole QS spectrum from 1 to 10. In fact, since it's a comparative number, by definition you'll have competitors covering the whole spectrum. Most will gather around the mean of 4 to 6 but a certain percentage at 7 and 8 (maybe 20%) and a lesser percentage at 9 and 10 (maybe 10%) but there will likely be a few in the upper ranges.

You must assume the same for bids, that competitors are bidding the going rate. So if the bid suggestion is $0.50, it's because you need to bid that much to get at or near the top, say positions 1 to 3 and closer to the first is typically preferable.

So even if your QS was 9, bidding $0.10 when the going rate is $0.50, depending on how many competitors for the keyword, you may not be in a favorable position. That would give you an ad rank of 90 ($0.10 x 9) while someone with a QS of 5 and bidding $0.25 is an ad rank of 125 and someone with a QS of 10 can bid $0.40 and rank higher since they have an ad rank of 400. Depending on how many competitors there are, yes, you would show in low positions. Since there's only 7 positions on the page (4 above organic rankings at top of page, 3 at bottom of page), you may not show very often since all it takes is seven competitors to beat your ad rank. Again, that's assuming a great QS which you surely won't get right away unless you are a are very good ad writer and do everything perfectly.

That's why I suggest to bid the "going rate". Because even with a great QS, you need to outrank competitors. Unless you don't mind being at the bottom or showing your ads to a small percentage of people searching for you. The Impression Share will tell you this.

The point of advertising is to get in front of as many eyes as possible. So it doesn't make sense to me to artificially suppress impressions and by extension clicks and sales with a low bid. Particularly with a low search volume keyword.

I don't believe there is such a thing as having no competitors. Doesn't matter if you see ads or not, that doesn't mean anything.

But if you do think you have no competitors, the more reason to run ads. Like I said, the going rate is $0.50 based on "horror games" keyword. That's based on historical data from Google (there has been advertisers for it and that's the bid suggestion). You say it's a survival video game so that's another keyword to use, a bit more expensive.

Just run a campaign and learn from the data.

If you don't feel super comfortable deciding bid rates and keywords on your own, I would recommend using Google Adwords Express. This allows you to just set a daily budget on what you are willing to spend and Google handles the rest.

I find it to be way easier to manage than the detailed Google campaigns, if you're new to this area of advertising.