SEM Development

For the past two months I’ve seen that when I add new keywords to Google AdWords they will start with a min bid of $5. This, of course, disables all of the newly added keywords and, since it would be daft to increase the bid to $5, they stay disabled. This ridiculously high min bid usually drops after about two days.

I’m not the only one to have noticed this Google AdWords trickery. I’ve always assumed that it was a sneaky way to introduce an editorial review process. By jacking up prices, Google makes it nearly impossible to traffic these keywords therefore giving them time to review the content of the destination page or creative. I’ve seen some other reasonable explanations for this phenomenom as well. The AdWords API group has a thread discussing this problem as well but I disagree that the min bid drops after adding creative. It still stays at $5 for around two days.

Whatever the reason, I wish Google would be a bit clearer about this policy.