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AdWords Minimum Bids: Lies, Disceptions and Misinformation

If you are an AdWords advertiser, you may quickly realize that "riches are in the niches," meaning that if you find really wonderful, relevant keywords that match what you sell with what customers want, these will generate high click thru rates, high conversion rates, and ultimately high sales.

 Yippie!!!!!!
However, Daddy Google has some bad news for you: minimum bids. You can have a wonderful, highly relevant ad on a wonderful, highly relevant keyword with all your "quality score" ducks in a row in terms of Google... In fact, you might be the ONLY advertiser on that keyword, and have a click thru rate upwards of 10%, and yet

Minimum Bids


 Google will automatically set the minimum bid for a keyword to some pretty high numbers. I have seen upwards of $20.00 for the CPC on bids for which everything is in alignment, and the quality score is fantastic...

 YET....

 Clearly "behind the scenes" Google has some algorithm to cost you A LOT of money thru it's minimum bids.  (And of course you can't see what the true minimum bids are (and I am NOT talking about the nonsense you'll see in the Keyword Planner).

The Good News

 However, I have found that if you systematically lower your bid... you can squeeze Google down to a more reasonable price.  So notch it down by 50 cents or less over a few weeks, and you can discover what the true minimum bid is: the least you have to pay for your ad to show reliably.

 Here's the propaganda about "minimum bids" from Google - it's only a half truth - here.

 And here's Wikipedia about "monopoly pricing" and "monopoly rents."

 Is Google a monopoly? You decide: if it looks like a duck, and acts like a duck...
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