Adwords $5.00 bids for keywords with no competition?

[cjbay]

Im new to adwords and I chose as many keywords as I could that had had low advertiser competition and high search volume. I used adwords keyword tool. Most of my keywords showed absolutely no advertiser competition and good average search but I chose 47 keywords and only 45 of them are active. My bids were placed at .30 cents and most of them (even though it says they have no advertiser competition) are saying that I need to raise my bids to activate them. I don't understand why the bids have to be so high if it says I have no competition.

Example:
One of the words is "ca mega millions".
It says I need to raise my bid to $5.00 in order to activate it.

Anyone know what's going on?

 

[jstme]

Bad quality score? Have you tried the same campaign with yahoo or msn? If so how do they do?

 

[iibrightblue]

45 out of 47 active is pretty good.

Really good actually.


Everything is due to the Quality Score of the keywords. Basically, Google's algorithm checks to see if your ad text, your landing page, and the keyword itself is in alignment with each other.

It's not a perfect analysis. Don't expect it to be.

But the closer you get to having those three elements aligned, the lower your cost per click should be. That is called optimizing.

50 cents per click minimum is pretty typical. $1.00 for more generic keywords. And yes $5.00 for a handful in every campaign I've done.

Basically, my strategy is to look carefully at the $1 requests and say yes to them on a case-by-case basis. The $5.00 ones, I'll try optimizing to get the Quality Score up, but for the most part I'll just let them go and wave those keywords goodbye.