Google Explains How Ad Pricing Works
I thought you’d be interested in this post from the Google AdWords blog:
http://adwords.blogspot.com/2007/10/common-misconception-revisited.html
It used to drive me nuts when I used to think that if there were fewer than 8 ads showing for a search phrase, that it was clear sailing. I’d build a page of good quality (in my opinion) content, upload it to my server, write an ad, bid 5 cents, and launch my ad.
Sure enough I’d be in first or second position. Then after a while my ad would be disabled and Google would be asking for 10 cents. Why? The page wasn’t filled. Didn’t they want to fill it?
I was remembering back to the good old days when minimum bids were .05 and if there weren’t 8 ads on a page, all the bidders were paying the same (I think). Then Google changed things, implemented the quality score, and actually allowed bids lower than .05 for advertisers that had super excellent (not an official nomenclature, by the way) quality scores.
The minimum bid suddenly did not correspond to how many bidders there were, it had everything to do with the quality score. And some keywords were more expensive to bid on than others, regardless of the quality score. Or so it seemed.
It made sense. If I could make $100 for every click that was sent to my site, obviously that must be a valuable keyword, and the ad space valuable real estate, why shouldn’t Google make more also?
But it took me a while to figure that out. Today Google explains it very well in their blog for all to learn in 2 minutes what it took me weeks of trial and error and pulling out hair to determine why I couldn’t get 5 cent bids if there were only 2 bidders.
Tag: AdWords and PPC
