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.

Maybe I’m the only one that sees it this way but I think you should be able to omit the destinationUrl when updating a Keyword or Criteria record. Currently, it is required, and thus omitting it results in a <destinationUrl xsi:nil="true"> being sent. This means your current destinationUrl is erased in favor of the ad group’s default URL. I just think that’s annoying. If I wanted to erase the destinationUrl I’d send a blank or NULL field. If I just don’t want to waste bandwidth by including it in the call, I’d like to be able to omit it. Apparently, that isn’t allowed.

Google’s TrafficEstimatorService has been a joke for a while now. In theory, it’s a great idea. Put in a keyword, get back the estimated impressions, clicks, and even an estimated average rank. The problem lies in the way Google ranks ads. Here’s an explanation right from the horse’s mouth:

Your keyword-targeted ad is ranked on search results and content pages based on its maximum cost-per-click (CPC) - or maximum cost-per-impression (CPM) for site-targeted ads - and Quality Score. Having relevant ad text, a high CPC (or for site-targeted ads, a high CPM), and a strong CTR will result in a higher position for your ad. Because this ranking system uses well-targeted, relevant ads to help determine your ad’s position, your ad can’t be locked out of the top position based solely on price.

Since your rank, and the number of times your ad is shown, is based on your ad text there’s a large area of doubt when Google tries to estimate the number of impressions you’re going to get with a completely new keyword. This and the lackluster display of accuracy so far, I’m assuming, is why they’ve changed it. Here’s the lowdown (or if you prefer to read the whole thread):

Gone:

• impressions - The estimated number of impressions for a given
  keyword
• ctr - The estimated click-through-rate for a given keyword.
• notShownPerDay - The estimated number of times that the ad would not be shown, despite a keyword match

Added:

• clicksPerDay - The estimated number of clicks generated
  per day for a keyword in a given ad group

I have to say, if this makes the system more accurate, I like this change. It keeps the main reason I use the estimation service intact, that is, to forecast the amount of money it’ll take to traffic a new keyword (or a few million). What it doesn’t do is try to estimate the relevancy of a keyword before it’s added to the campaign. That’s fine with me. I like to determine the relevance of a keyword by the amount of money it’s profiting, not by its CTR.

I’ll get back to you on whether the new system is actually more accurate …