Automatic adjustment of bids

[grobinso]

Hi all, hoping someone can show me where i'm going wrong or missing something obvious with my Adwords campaigns.

To date i have tried to promote my sites through SEO and whilst i have had some good resulsts, i find it is far too volatile, one minute you are up and the next way way down.

So i have turned to Adwords, and have had quite good results over the last couple of months. I think i understand how position on the page is affected by 'quality score' , bid & CTR etc but one thing that i am having problems with is how to adust my bids automatically for sudden changes in CPC that seem to occur during the day.

For example, i can bid 20p for keyword at say 10am and my ad could be shown high up on the page, sometimes in position 1. However an hour later , when presumably there is more demand for the product my ad could be nowhere to be seen and i may have to increase the bd to 50p or more just to get on the front page. Funny thing is though that my competitors still seem to always be on the front page.

I assume that they must be using some external bid management software to automatically adjust bids as i cant find a way in Adwords of doing this, i know i can specify within Adwords a range where i want my ads to appear on the front page but if my bids not high enough to get on the front page in the first place then this feature is irrelevant.

I seem to spend more time these days just keeping an eye on Adwords and making sure my ads are being shown, oh and on top of that trying to keep an eye on the click frauders. I like Adwords, its quick to get a campaign up and running but the amount of work involved monitoring it is slowing me down on developing the rest of my sites.

Maybe i'm missing something obvious or maybe i have the wrong grip on how it works, if i have i'd appreciate your comments and suggestions.

Thanks in advance

Graham

[tbp]

I think there are likely to be bid management tools, but i`m sure they probably break the adwords t's and c's.

Adverts will always move round, especially if competitors are on the ball. You put your price up to move above someone else, they see and raise their bid and your back to where you were. At the end of the day, a lot of times your can can move up with a lower CPC because other people's budgets have run out.

One of the best ways to stay in your position is to set accelerated ad showing to on. If you do this, it will display your ad as many times as possible until your budget it used (but you can up it if you see this happening). If you leave it on the normal setting, it will spread you ad out over 24 hours, in accordance with your budget. If you get say 50 clicks in the first hour, and don't have a massive budget, then you ad may only get shown a couple of times for the next hour, to make your budget last over the course of the day. Obviously these figures are made up, just to illustrate my point, it all depends on your CPC and budget.

Setting accelerated showing to on just keeps showing your ad as many times as it can, so you can stay around the same position, and show up almost constantly.

Also try turning off the content network unless its generating good sales. I find that you your ad gets shown a huge amount, but you don't get that many clicks, so google decides your ad isn't great. Your CPC goes up, and your position goes down. I haven't found one site of mine yet that the content network has worked for, in my own experience it just makes your ad's cost more!

[grobinso]

Thanks for the reply TBP.

I always switch off the content network at the very beginning, like you i have never found them to bring any converting traffic. I also have played around with changing the daily budged from say a few pound (say £20-30 ) and several hundred punds and it doesn't seem to make a jot of difference.

I do use accellerated ad showing and initially i rotate my ads equally and then switch to 'chow best performing ads' when i see which are converting.

I suspect that bid management software is at work, anyone else have any views?

[Shane]

first thing is to make sure you search using the adwords preview tool here : http://www.google.co.uk/adpreview

this will give you the view a first time searcher will get and help you to ascertain your "true" position rather than seeing your ads slide over the day thinking it's all going wrong when it may be just you who is seeing this.

the fact you may be doing repetitive searches for your terms and NOT clicking them triggers one of googles algo tweaks which then shows other ads higher than the intial 1/2/3 etc. spots...

It's a viable concept.. if you've been shown the same ad 5/10 times and not clicked any then maybe showing you some others even though they are bidding less etc.. may yeild a click for the ever more greedy g$$gle

I'd concentrate more on building up your Click through ratio, and worry less about bids for now, you'll find that by getting a better quality ad, that has a higher CTR than the competition you will get you more consistent positioning over time .. there's plenty of information out there about how to increase your CTR, the main points really need you to pay attention to is adcopy, keyword matching and negatives..