Suggestions for Google About Google Adwords

Your system asks for minimum bids of $5 and $10 on some keywords because the only ads that have appeared historically are for advertisers buying every possible keyword - and in these cases none or almost none of them actually offer what is being advertised.

This situation is running off advertisers who actually DO sell what the keyword describes.

I just ran into this challenge yesterday advertising gingerbread cookies. The only ads displayed were for ebay, target, nextag, alibris, and shopping.com.

Not one bakery or specialty seller is running ads on many of the keywords for that product, probably because $5-$10 a click would make those some awfully expensive cookies.

TIP for advertisers: Ignore the minimum bid and leave the ads active and at least some of them will run. Then try raising the bids higher (but obviously not to $5-$10) on any that don't go active as they may have higher competition. You are likely to see impressions and clicks even on those that continue to say they're "Inactive for search".

[ Message was edited by: flyingrose 11/12/2006 06:35 pm ]

Any chance we could have an option to set positions at the ad group and campaign levels instead of having to go into the bid editing page for each ad group?

You are absolutely right that for many keywords the actual seller/adviser are unable to advertise for such targeted keywords becuase of the high costs. There should be some mechanism such that only the sellers who actually sell the product will be able to bid on the key words only.

The challenge is for the very large, very broad sites such as ebay and the selling and price comparison sites to manage the massive numbers of keywords they are using. These ads and probably even the keyword phrases being used are utilizing dynamic insertion.

One solution to this particular challenge would be for Google to eliminate those types of sites from being used in the algorithm that determines the historical value of keywords.

Another would be to allow a way for a specific advertiser to indicate that they would like a trial period to generate historical data for their account.

Demand must be really high for Google Adwords this holiday season. Response time has really degraded. During daylight and evening hours there are many errors, especially "your last changes were not processed" which I haven't seen since last holiday season.

If I work through the night I don't see those errors much so they're definitely resource demand related. I hope Google ads more servers to handle the demand since even though holiday demand is higher than other times of the year, their continual growth will easily justify expansion.

P.S. The keywords that originally wanted minimum bids of $5.00 and $10.00 went active and bids to keep them on the first page of results were under fifty cents.