Need help with my Adwords campaign

I created a campaign... max bid $2.00. On Overture that would make it in the top 3 bids.
So it runs on Adwords for a day with $2 max bid.
Then the next day, most of my keywords get suspended with a message " optimize or raise bid to minimum $10 "
$10 minimum??? Are they nuts?
The thing is, I can't possibly optimize the ad any more. I mean what do they want, a bunch of keyword-packed descriptions?
I'm a bit confused here. My website is very targeted to the keywords. I am willing to bid to get a decent amount of traffic. But I am stuck, because my ad is not seen by them as optimized enough... and $10 min bid would be totally outrageous.
Does this happen to you guys?

Oops, sorry, I should have read your posts on this topic Flyingrose.
Yes, it seems that Google has messed up AW with greed.
The thing I am wondering, if I set my min. on a keyword to $10 as they recommend, will that mean I really pay min. $10 per click?
Or will I only pay .01 more than the max bidder on that keyword...

I have a bunch of small minimum bids set in accounts (from ten cents to $1) and those clicks are costing far less than the bid they required; however, I have seen it charge the actual minimum amount when I set the bids to one of those high minimums like $5 or $10.

I do not know if that was because there was that much competition or because multiple advertisers had that minimum and so all of us would have to pay the $10 if more than one of us had a $10 bid set.

I have created new campaigns and ad groups and had keywords that required ridiculous minimums. I just let them sit there and they started running. Other times they never run.

"Improve quality" doesn't refer only to your ads; it also refers to your keyword selection and landing page.

FR, thanks,
Hey, here is what I am wondering...
For my problem... if I am getting frustrated with Google, do you think hiring a PPC manager is a solution here?
Basically, I have seen that my website responds well to Google traffic. But my adword account is getting me nowhere.
Can a PPC manager guarantee me that I will get lots of hits for a REASONABLE ppc?
Lets put it this way, I want to bid on a term that, on Yahoo, the top 3 bids are about $2 per click. But with Google, it's all messed up because they want $10 min per click.
Could a manager fix this for me?

Google Adwords is a far more complex system than most realize. It can frustrate most anyone at times. Most of the time someone really exceptional can find a way to buy at least some traffic at a cost that will work for the advertiser.

I have seen two accounts where buying traffic for anything less than $5-$10 did not seem possible. One was for mortgage related keywords which are just highly competitive. Google put minimum bids of $5-$10 on the other account for every keyword phrase that contained the name of the product he was selling.

There was also a $5-$10 minimum on every synonym I could come up with and even some that were barely related. I had advertised that item in the past for someone else so I suspect that issue may have been because his account had a bad history. I don't know of any way to verify that.

If you would like me to look at your account and see if I can determine why Google has set such high minimums and whether any other keywords would be more reasonable you can contact me here via PM.

There are many variables involved in their Quality issue that sets those high minimums so it is possible some adjustments would make all the difference.